


Breaking (Saving) You

by Rainne



Series: To Live Without the Sun [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Dark, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/M, Hydra (Marvel), Other: See Story Notes, Red Room, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-08
Updated: 2014-10-19
Packaged: 2018-02-20 10:37:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 54,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2425625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainne/pseuds/Rainne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU of an AU.</p><p>Darcy Lewis is thirteen years old when she meets her soul mate.  It turns out that he's a brainwashed assassin working for HYDRA.  And it further turns out that HYDRA thinks it might be useful to have their assassin's soul mate on hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [saving (breaking) you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2015277) by [amusewithaview](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amusewithaview/pseuds/amusewithaview). 



> **ATTENTION READERS:**
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> 
> This is not a fluffy story. There are some parts that are humorous and some that are pleasant; there are also many parts that are not. _This is a dark fic._ This is a fic about the kinds of things that might happen if HYDRA kidnapped the teenage soul mate of their brainwashed cyborg assassin and turned her into a brainwashed cyborg assassin as well. 
> 
> Because of the MANY, MANY possible triggers in this fic, I have elected **not** to tag or warn for anything specific. There just isn't any way I could be sure to get everything, and I'm not going to try. So if you think that you might be triggered by anything in this story, I strongly encourage you to ask someone to preview this fic for you and tell you if it contains your personal issues. You are also welcome to inquire directly to me (my contact information is in my profile) about particular issues, and I can tell you more.
> 
> **Please exercise caution and common sense if you know that you are triggered by violent or graphic material.**
> 
> Also, it is helpful but absolutely not necessary to have read at least the first chapter of the inspiring story by amusewithaview before reading this story.

**September 1964**

**Outside Chicago**

Darcy Jo Lewis is thirteen years old and sulky when she meets her soul mate on a chilly fall afternoon. She is missing school in favor of being dragged from Wisconsin through Illinois to a family reunion in Michigan.

Ugh, Detroit.

She manages to slip away from her parents in a crowded roadside rest stop, making her way outside for some quiet to sulk about everything she's missing at home, but the quiet is interrupted by an odd _pop, pop_ sound, which is followed almost immediately by a screech of tires and then a crash from the nearby state highway. Darcy, naturally curious and with a head full of Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, darts toward the place where she'd heard the popping.

There is a man sitting behind a copse of bushes, disassembling a gun and tucking parts of it away into his clothing. She gasps, and he glances up at her with a sardonic half-smirk. "It's called a Dragunov, кукла. Don't worry, I doubt you'll ever see one again."

Her hand flies to her chest, to the words written in hasty manuscript just above the incipient budding of her breasts. "Those are the words on my soul mark," she manages to say through numb lips. "I - I think you're my soul mate."

"Impossible."

By the time Darcy rejoins her parents a few minutes later, the police are beginning to arrive. Darcy's mother takes one look at her daughter and reaches out, gripping Darcy's hands. "Baby, what's the matter? What happened?"

Darcy considers being stoic for a brief moment, and then, like the child she still is, she falls into her mother's arms and sobs out the whole story. How he was there, and how he had a gun, and how he said he didn't have a soul, and how he didn't want her, and how he walked away and left her there, alone.

By the time she's done talking, someone who overheard has alerted the police that there's a girl inside the rest stop with information, and she finds herself, not much later, sitting between her parents in an interview room at the local police station, explaining about the shooter to an older man with an expression of rude disbelief on his face. She draws a diagram - not a very good one, because she's not much of an artist - to show where the shooter -  _ her soul mate  _ \- was sitting to the side of the building. The investigator looks at the drawing, then looks back at her, and he sneers something about kids with overactive imaginations, and Darcy knows, she  _ knows _ she shouldn't do it, but she just can't stop herself.

She reaches up and grabs the neck of her shirt and pulls it down far enough to reveal the stark black lettering that runs beneath her collarbone. "Is this enough proof for you, asshole?"

"Darcy!" her father exclaims. "Language!"

"Sorry, Dad," Darcy mutters, releasing her shirt and smoothing it back into place.

The investigator steps out of the room; a few minutes later, a different one comes in. He takes Darcy's statement this time with an obvious, and gratifying, air of seriousness, and when she's done, he reaches out and pats her hand, managing not to seem condescending as he does so. "I'm really sorry about this," he says to her, his voice sympathetic. "It's very hard to be rejected by a soul mate, and to find out your soul mate isn't a good person, and you've held up really well under the circumstances. Thank you for this information. Hopefully we'll find him soon."

"Thank you," she says softly.

The new investigator, a tall man with limp white-blond hair and watery gray eyes, looks over at her father. "Will you be continuing on your trip tonight? It's just that we need a way to get in touch with you if we find this man; we might need her to identify him."

Her father shakes his head. "We're going to stay in town tonight, since it's late and it's been a trying sort of afternoon. We'll be going on to Wisconsin tomorrow, but I'll leave phone numbers where we can be reached." He pauses. "You wouldn't happen to know a decent motel around here, would you?"

The blond man gives her father the name of a nearby motor court that he promises is very nice, and takes the contact information that her father gives him, and then they leave. Darcy sits in the back seat, staring blankly out the window, while her father navigates to the motel. It's starting to sink in: she met her soul mate today. She doesn't know his name. He's apparently a murderer. What does that say about her? She grows quieter and quieter as the evening wears on, and after several unsuccessful attempts at getting her to talk, her parents give up and they all go to bed.

Darcy lies in her bed, listening to her parents settle down in their bed, and stares into the darkness. She doesn't really want to sleep because every time she closes her eyes, she sees his face shuttering when she tells him that she thinks he's her soulmate. She feels the tears she's been fighting back all day start to fill her eyes.

Outside, she hears a church tower clock strike midnight. She hears a car drive across the parking lot right outside their room. Its headlights wash across their window, making funny patterns on the opposite wall through the venetian blinds. Someone walks past their door in heavy boots.

With a crash, the door flies open. Darcy, her mother, and her father all sit up in bed. Her father shouts, flinging the covers back. Her mother screams. There are two explosions of sound, and her parents' shouting abruptly ends. And then there are men in the room, grabbing her, dragging her from her bed. She screams for her father, for her mother, but as the men drag her out the door, she can see them both lying in their beds, and she realizes that those explosions were gunshots, and her parents are dead.

She is dragged past her mother's station wagon, numb with shock and fear and grief, and shoved into the back of a van. She lands hard on the floor and stares up at the man there: the police investigator with the blond hair and the watery gray eyes. He smirks down at her. "Hello, Darcy," he says. "It's so nice to see you again."

~*~

The place they take her is way out in the woods and underground, like a bomb shelter. It's huge, though – a massive complex of hallways and rooms and things that look like science labs, and there are uniformed soldiers everywhere who stare at Darcy as she is forced along, barefoot and in the knee-length green flannel nightie her mother sewed for her, with tears running down her face and the barrel of a gun pressed against her spine.

They steer her into a small windowless room. Inside the room is a bunch of equipment of a kind she's never seen before. There are television screens everywhere with pictures all over them, and there's a huge chair with a bunch of attachments, and things that look like computers but much fancier and she'd probably kind of be interested in them if her parents weren't murdered and she wasn't kidnapped and her soul mate who rejected her wasn't sitting on the chair with no shirt on, staring at her in shock. She stares back, also in shock. She hadn't realized, earlier, that he had a metal arm and hand; it had been covered by his jacket and a glove. But now she can see it, and it is shiny and sleek and terrifying, with a red star on the shoulder.

He looks up at the blond man with the gray eyes, waiting for an explanation.

The blond man says, "Darcy, is this the man you saw earlier today?"

Tentatively, Darcy nods. The man continues, "And will you please tell me what you said to him when you saw him?"

Darcy swallows against her suddenly dry throat. "I, um. He s-said his gun was a Dragunov, and I said that those were the words on my soul mark and I thought he might be my soul mate."

The blond man nods, and he turns to the one sitting in the chair. "You have words on your arm. What do they say?"

The man in the chair looks down at his arm, and his face registers something like surprise at the sight. "It says 'Those are the words on my soul mark. I - I think you're my soul mate'."

Darcy swallows hard. So she had been right. Her soul mate looks back up at her, and his expression changes just a little bit. He looks... sad? He says, "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," she says automatically.

"Touching," the blond man says. He points to one of the soldiers. "Put them both in Cell Four."

"Together?" the soldier asks.

The blond man nods. "For now. Let them..." He pauses, grinning, and it isn't a pleasant sight. "Get to know each other."

~*~

Cell Four is tiny and dim, lit only by a single bare bulb that emits a weak light. They shove Darcy in first, hard enough that she actually falls forward onto the filthy mattress that is the cell's only furniture. When she looks up, the man - her soul mate - is entering the room behind her. The soldier outside slams the door shut and throws what sounds like a heavy locking mechanism, and then he walks away, laughing softly.

Darcy scrambles backward, away from him, but she can only go so far in a room that might be five feet square, and she ends up huddling in the corner with her knees drawn up to her chest, staring at him in terror. She expects him to lunge for her, to demand that she remove her clothing, to, well,  _ anything, _ really, except for what he does, which is cross the room and sit in the opposite corner, his legs crossed in front of him and his hands resting on his knees.

She stares at him. He stares back at her for a long moment before speaking, and she is surprised at how gentle his voice is when he says, "I'm not going to hurt you."

She swallows hard. "You're not?"

He shakes his head. "If I was going to hurt you, girl, I'd have done it this afternoon when you saw me."

"Oh." She considers that for a long moment before relaxing a little bit, sitting up straighter and letting her knees fall to one side. She says, "Did... did you cause that accident?"

"Yes."

She hadn't been expecting the blunt honesty, and she blinks a moment before asking, "Why?"

"I was ordered to," he replies.

"Do you always do everything they order you to do?"

He shrugs. "Yes."

"Why?"

"Because that's what I do, кукла."

She says, "You called me that before. What does it mean?"

He pauses for a moment before saying, "'Doll.' It means 'doll.' It's Russian."

"My name is Darcy," she tells him.

He shrugs again. "I won't remember. Don't take it personally."

"Why won't you remember?"

"Because that's the protocol," he explains. "I wake up, I get my orders, I carry them out. If there's anything extra, they wipe me. I forget it. Only mission-essential information and skills are retained. Then I go back to the cold capsule." He shivers slightly, even though his expression is carefully blank. "And as cute as you are, you're not mission-essential. They'll take you when they wipe me." He pauses. "I'm sorry about that. But it's not my decision."

She feels her eyes begin to fill with tears and fights them back because some part of her knows that he will see them as weakness. "What are they going to do with me?" she asks, her voice a bare whisper.

He shakes his head. "I don't know," he says. He considers her. "They might send you home, but I doubt it."

"There's no one there," she tells him, pressing her forehead against her knees. "They killed my mom and dad when they kidnapped me."

He nods once. "That's standard," he says. "Witnesses are a liability."

And then she  _ does  _ break down, thinking about her mom and dad and those two gunshots and that last glimpse she got when she knew they were dead, and the home she's never going to see again and the dog that is staying at the neighbor's house while they're gone, and the cousins she didn't want to see anyway and her friends who will wonder what happened, and somewhere in the middle of it he sits down on the mattress beside her and pulls her into his lap, and he wraps his strong arms around her and holds her close while she cries herself to sleep.

She is awakened by the sound of the heavy locking mechanism being thrown open, and she shields her eyes with one hand when the bright light from the corridor falls directly across her face. It is the blond man with the watery eyes, and he is flanked by two dark-haired soldiers with guns. "Get up," he says.

Her soul mate shifts her out of his lap and onto her feet, then gets to his own. She shrinks behind him, just a bit, her fingers gripping at one of his belt loops. "Come on," the blond man says impatiently. "Both of you."

Her soul mate moves forward, and Darcy follows, hovering at his back. She doesn't feel safe by any stretch of the imagination, but she feels  _ better _ , at least, knowing that he won't hurt her. She doesn't have that assurance about anyone else. 

They return to the room with the computers and the chair. The blond man orders her soul mate to sit down, and he obeys, looking at Darcy with his big, sad eyes. Across the room, several technicians are feeding punch cards into the computer's slots, twisting various dials and doing different things that she can't identify. Finally, one of them says, "We're ready."

The blond man nods. "Post-mission protocols," he says. "Fuel, rest, wipe. You've had your fuel and your rest."

"Yes, sir," her soul mate replies. He allows the technician to push him until he is reclining in the chair.

Darcy looks around, her eyes getting huge. She doesn't know what's about to happen, but she doesn't think it's going to be good. The blond man says, "Hold her," and someone takes hold of Darcy's upper arms from behind in a grip she can't break.

One of the technicians offers her soul mate a bite guard; he takes it without hesitation, relaxing back into the chair. His eyes never leave Darcy's, regardless of the spinning machinery that moves around his head. A switch is thrown, and restraints clamp down around his arms. He begins taking deep, even breaths, and she can see the fear creeping onto his face. She struggles. "What are you doing? Let him go!"

And then she sees the arcs of electricity in the panels on the spinning armature - panels that are closing down around her soul mate's head. He starts to scream, and so does she, fighting to get away from whoever is holding her, to get to him, to help him. He is in agony, his body convulsing in the grip of the restraints, and she is sobbing and shrieking, demanding that they let her go, let him go, stop hurting him, stop it, stop it, stop it!

And then, quite suddenly, it _does_ stop, and the chair lets him go, and he sags, a silvery line of drool running down from the side of his mouth. One of the technicians retrieves the bite guard from his mouth, looks into his eyes, and says, " Перезагрузка."

There is a long moment's pause before he speaks, and when he does, it's in Russian. There is a brief back-and-forth, questions from the technician and one- or two-word answers from him. And then the technician says, "He's ready."

At a nod from the blond man, two of the soldiers step forward and haul Darcy's soul mate out of the chair. He staggers between them, his legs refusing to cooperate for a moment, and they hold him up until he can get his feet underneath him. Then they guide him, half-supporting him, out of the room and up a hallway. Darcy is dragged along behind.

The room that they go into next looks like a storage room - there are racks and racks of boxes and crates in various sizes as far as Darcy can see. And in one corner, there is a capsule that looks like something out of a science fiction movie. The soldiers half-carry her soul mate over to it, turn him around, and guide him to step backward into it.

He stands there, blank, for a long moment. And then the blond man moves, exposing Darcy to her soul mate's view. He blinks, and his eyes focus on her. And he smiles, just a little bit. "Goodbye,  кукла," he says. And then one of the soldiers shuts the capsule, and the other one manages the latch and presses a button, and before her eyes, she watches him freeze solid, his eyes locked to hers until they close reflexively against the ice.

And she is alone with the soldiers and the blond man, who sneers down at her. "Put her in Cell Three," he says. "I don't think she's quite ready yet."

Cell Three, it turns out, is exactly like Cell Four, only there is no light and no mattress. There is a hole in the floor in one corner, where she can relieve herself, and she is occasionally given food and water - a hard half-loaf of brown bread and a stale jug of water - through a slot at the base of the door. She has no idea how often that is; it could be twice a day, or once, or every two days.

She doesn't know how long she stays there in the dark; long enough that the nightmares about her dead parents start to recede, but not long enough to forget the sound of her soul mate's voice saying goodbye to her. She realizes, not long into her imprisonment, that she doesn't even know what his name is. She tries out several names for him in her head, but none of them fit. She almost decides to call him Paul, because she thinks he looks a little bit like Paul McCartney, but then she decides not to. She doesn't want to get into the habit of calling him something and then have it be wrong.

At last they come for her: one of the technicians, this time, and one soldier. She is dazzled by the light when they bring her out of the cell, and apparently she smells pretty bad, because the technician's face wrinkles up and he ducks away from her. She bristles. "It's not my fault!" she snaps. "I didn't  _ ask _ to be stuck in there!"

The soldier slaps her hard across the face. "Quiet," he snaps.

She stares, too shocked to even cry. The technician says, "Assets speak when they are spoken to."

Numbly, she nods her understanding. She follows them through the building, and is pushed into another small room. This one is much like her cell, but there is a drain in the concrete floor. The technician steps in with her, moving behind a half-wall; the soldier blocks the doorway. The technician says, "Strip."

She says, "No."

The soldier steps forward and backhands her into the wall. Both men wait until she straightens up and the technician speaks again. "Strip."

She says, "No."

The soldier backhands her again, harder. She falls to her knees this time. When she stands up, the technician orders her to strip a third time. She refuses again. The soldier knocks her down again, and this time the technician says, "Strap her." She tries to get up, but the technician is there, one hand on the back of her neck with an iron grip, holding her down. His other hand grabs the fabric of her filthy nightie and pulls it up, baring her back.

The leather makes a whistling noise when it cuts through the air, and the crack as it hits her back happens just a split second before fire erupts under her skin. The soldier beats her until she's screaming in pain, until her back is a mass of agony, and then he stops. The technician lets her go and steps back. She pants softly in the aftermath, staring at the floor underneath her. When she thinks she can manage it, she gets unsteadily to her feet.

The technician says, "Strip."

Darcy strips.

She is hosed down with a powerful blast of cold water. While she still stands on top of the drain, dripping and naked, she is given a comb and she combs her hair out. Then the technician cuts it off at chin length. She is toweled off roughly, biting her lip against the agony in her back, and then given a pair of sweat pants and a man's white undershirt and allowed to dress. When they walk out of the room, her hair is still on the floor, on top of her underwear and the green flannel nightie that her mother sewed for her.

They take her back to the room with the chair, and this time she is the one sitting down in it. She fights at first, out of fear, but she is simply shoved down, her back screaming against the padded backrest, and the technician flips the switch that activates the restraints. No matter how she fights, she isn't getting out of those. The machinery above her head begins to whir, and she whines in fear. "Just relax," the technician tells her. "All I'm doing right now is scanning your brain. This part won't hurt."

She tries to cringe away anyway, but it doesn't do any good. The armature clamps down around her head just like it had done around her soul mate's head. She whines again in anticipation of pain, but it doesn't come; the technician was telling the truth about this part, at least.

He begins to ask her questions. He asks about her parents, her home, her friends, her family. He asks about her school, her pets, her hobbies and interests. He asks what she wants to do when she grows up, whether she has a boyfriend, who her favorite teacher is. He asks all manner and variety of questions, probing into every facet of her life, making her recount memories of birthdays and school trips and even the time she was hit by a car when she was seven.

The whole time he is questioning her, the technician never looks at her. After the first few questions, Darcy realizes that she can see one of the screens he is watching; it has a picture of a brain on it, and every time he asks her something, parts of the brain change color. She comes to the slow realization that it is  _ her _ brain that she is looking at. She watches the colors change with interest, wondering what they mean but not daring to ask.

Finally, though, the interrogation ends. The technician leaves the room. Darcy watches the picture of her brain until he comes back, accompanied by the blond man. The technician goes to do something to the computers; the blond man steps up until he is in Darcy's line of sight. He stares down into her face. "I have to thank you," he says. "You saved us a lot of trouble farther down the line. A soul mate is a very dangerous thing for an asset like ours; that kind of bond is probably the only thing that could break through the conditioning. But now that we have you, we don't need to worry about that kind of thing."

He smiles, and she feels her blood run cold. He picks up something from the table nearby; it is a bite guard like the one they put in her soul mate's mouth. She clamps her teeth together; he defeats her by simply pinching her nose shut and shoving the guard in when she has to breathe. Then he steps back, turning to look at the technician. "Go ahead," he says.

Fire explodes inside her brain. She chokes on a gasp, her jaw clenching around the guard in her mouth, and then she screams and screams and screams.

When it stops, she sags in her bonds, the pain in her back absolutely nothing compared to the blessed relief of the  _ absence _ of pain in her head. Someone takes the guard out of her mouth and she pants freely as the armature above her head whirs away. Someone steps up and peers into her eyes, and says, "Reset."

She feels information slotting itself into her brain. The man in front of her is Technician. There are other men in the room who are also Technician. Behind Technician is a man in a suit; she recognizes him as Handler. Handler speaks. "What is your name?"

She frowns. "I don't know."

He nods. "You are an Asset. Your designation is Beta. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"What is your designation?"

"Beta, sir."

"What is your function?"

She searches her memory. "Parameter: function undefined."

"Where are your parents?"

She searches her memory. "Parameter: parents undefined."

"Who is your soul mate?"

She searches her memory. "The man with the Dragunov," she says. "The man with the metal arm. Designation unknown."

"He is also an Asset. His designation is Alpha. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Who is your soul mate?"

"Asset designation: Alpha."

There is a long moment of silence. Then Handler asks another question. "What are your orders?"

She searches her memory. "Active orders: undefined. Standing orders: Obey Handler. Obey Technician. Obey Asset designation: Alpha."

"Good," Handler says. "Come along."

She tries to stand; a man her brain identifies as Soldier has to help her up because her legs will not cooperate with her orders. He helps her to stand until she can mostly hold herself up, and then he helps her to walk when she can't quite manage it. With Soldier's assistance, she follows Handler down a hallway and into a storage room. In a corner of the room she sees two metal capsules with glass windows in them; inside one of them, she can see Asset designation: Alpha. He appears to be in stasis. The second capsule is empty. Technician, who has come behind her, goes over and opens it. Soldier helps her across the room and guides her to stand inside the capsule. Handler says, "When you wake, it will be time to train. Your life is now given to the service of HYDRA."

"Yes, sir," she says. Technician closes the door of the capsule; she hears the latch lock on the outside. There is a moment of nothing, and then a moment of cold so intense that it literally steals her breath. Her eyes close reflexively against the ice.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should mention that I draw a lot on comic canon for this 'verse, so if you see something you're not familiar with, don't freak out. :)

**June 1969**

**Outside Leningrad**

Beta is fifteen years old. She knows this because the other girls that she trains with are also fifteen years old, and Yelena tells her that the girls at this training facility are always separated by age. There are no boys at this facility, except for Technician and Soldier and Trainer. Handler was here when Beta woke up, but he left, and Asset designation: Alpha is here, but he is still in his capsule.

Beta sometimes slips from the dormitory late at night and pads down to the basement where the capsules are. She is fairly certain that she will be punished if she is caught, but that is all right; she wants to see Asset designation: Alpha and is willing to take the risk. He is her soul mate. Sometimes she feels a constriction in her chest, and it feels like his designation. She thinks that she knew what his voice sounded like, once, but she isn't certain. Sometimes her memories are a little fuzzy.

The facility is a training ground for the Red Room's Black Widow program. This is a thing that Beta knows because she heard Technician talking to Technician about it when she came out of the capsule. That was two years ago, when she was still thirteen. She remembers that her back hurt very badly when she came out of the capsule, but she does not remember why. She has a vague idea that it might have been punishment for noncompliance; noncompliance is punished harshly at this facility.

Beta is one of the best in her training group. She is not  _ the _ best - that honor goes always to Natalia - but she is very, very good. And today, on a humid summer afternoon, Trainer calls Beta and Yelena and Natalia together and tells them that because they are the best in their year-group, they are going to be receiving special training. And when they report to the training ground, Asset designation: Alpha is standing in the center of the yard.

Beta ruthlessly represses the urge to run to him. She waits instead to see if he will acknowledge her. He does - there is a tiny nod when he meets her eyes - but otherwise there is nothing. Beta is not hurt by this; now is simply not the time. There is a time and a place for everything, and if an asset is not capable of being ignored by another asset without hurt feelings, that asset will not last long in the field. The enemy is always watching, and emotions, especially visible emotions, turn an asset into a target.

Asset designation: Alpha waits until they are standing in front of him. He studies them carefully, as they stand there for his inspection. His eyes flick over Yelena, then Beta, then Natalia, examining them as if cataloging their strengths and weaknesses without even needing to see them in action. Once he has finished looking at them, he takes three steps back and he says, "Take me down."

Yelena explodes into action, moving before either Beta or Natalia has a chance to. She lunges at him, using some of her best moves against him. She tries to get an arm around his throat; she tries to get his leg out from under him. She even tries to knee him in the groin, but he's wearing protective gear. After letting her struggle against him for several minutes, he moves to disable her, knocking her unconscious.

When he does, Beta moves. She eases to one side and comes at him from what she thinks is a blind spot, going for his throat. He doesn't even blink before putting her on her back in the dirt, his pistol aimed at her head. She freezes, tapping the ground to indicate her surrender. He ignores her, looking across the yard at Natalia. "Well?" he says. "Why do you not attack?"

"Because I cannot take you down," Natalia replies. "I am a fifteen-year-old girl and you are a man twice my age and weight, with superior training and weaponry. If I am going to best you, I am going to do so by subterfuge, not by attacking. Such an action would be foolhardy at best, and completely stupid at worst."

"You are correct," he tells Natalia, and rewards her for her intelligence with a fine new hunting knife. Beta burns with shame and envy when she picks herself up out of the dirt.

Asset designation: Alpha gives them their orders. They are to continue their academic work as usual, but for training, they are to come to him. "Do not expect me to be easy on you," he warns them before dismissing them for the day. "If I am hard on you now, it is to keep you from becoming dead when you are older. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," they say in unison. Natalia's hand clenches around the sheath of her fine new knife. Beta clenches her jaw and her fists. Asset designation: Alpha dismisses them, and Beta hesitates for only a moment, hoping that he will speak to her personally now that the lessoning is over. He does not; instead, he turns his back on them and walks away across the compound. Beta wonders if it is because she failed today. Perhaps she must earn his attention. She resolves that she will do so.

~*~

It is four weeks before Asset designation: Alpha acknowledges her again. Four weeks of being consistently outshone by Natalia, four weeks of struggling to maintain second place against Yelena and not always managing it, four weeks of wondering if Asset designation: Alpha really does remember her, or if she imagined that tiny nod on the first day. Late one night after a particularly bad training session in which Yelena bested her at hand-to-hand three times in a row and Asset designation: Alpha made a particularly cutting remark about her skills (or lack thereof), Beta slips out of the dormitory and makes her way down to the basement where the two empty capsules stand side by side.

She curls up between them, resting her forehead against her knees, and she takes slow, deep breaths and tries not to cry. She feels heavy with failure, with grief, with loss. Asset designation: Alpha apparently does not remember her, and she is doomed to spend the remainder of her training coming in a dismal third place to both Natalia and Yelena and suffering his blank-faced scorn the whole time. And if he decides she is not skilled enough to continue training, the Masters might eliminate her from the program altogether.

She fights the tears. Emotions are weakness.

She fails in this, too.

The door creaks slightly when it opens; her head jerks up, turning in horror. There is no time to run, no place to hide. She is caught. She gets to her feet and wipes hastily at her eyes, hoping to hide the evidence of her weakness from whoever is coming into the room. And she stares, her mind going blank, when she realizes that it is Asset designation: Alpha.

She swallows hard when he steps into the small storage room and pulls the door shut behind him. He leans against the inside of the door and studies her in the dim light. She straightens her back and shoulders. "Sir," she says softly.

"Stand down," he answers. "I'm not here to punish you." He regards her quietly for a moment, then takes a deep breath and releases it in an explosive sigh. "I can't show favoritism, do you understand?"

She blinks, thinks about it, then shakes her head. "No, sir."

He takes the precaution of reaching behind himself and locking the door before he crosses the room and seats himself in front of his capsule, reaching out to her with his metal hand. Confused, she takes his hand and allows him to pull her down and into his lap. Immediately she feels better, as the warmth of his body leeches into hers. She thinks that she remembers this from before –  _ before what? _ her mind queries – but she puts that hazy feeling aside in favor of being present in the moment. 

When he speaks, his voice rumbles through her body. "You are my soul mate," he says, and she feels some of the tension drain out of her at his acknowledgement. "They know that you are my soul mate. The fact that you are my soul mate is the only reason you are still alive." His flesh hand comes up to cup her head, his fingers threading into her hair. "You put yourself into the training group with Natalia and Yelena on your own merits. I did not choose you for it. But I cannot seem to be favoring you now that you are in it. They are watching."

He pauses, then squeezes her hip gently with his metal hand. "More than that, though: if I  _ did _ favor you, I would be doing you no favors." He grins slightly at her, enjoying his own pun. "When you finish training, there will be missions. You will have your own part to play in this grand game. You must be able to play it. I think that they intend for us to be partners, eventually, but even if I am right about that, I will not always be able to protect you. You must be able to protect yourself." He pauses again, and he whispers against her ear, "If you were not here, I think I might go mad."

She clutches at him, holding him tightly. "I think... I think there's something very important that I can't remember," she whispers. "Sometimes... sometimes I have dreams about things that can't be real, and people that don't exist."

"So do I," he whispers back. And then he does something very strange: he stops speaking Russian and uses English instead. "Don't tell anyone about them."

She shakes her head, and replies in English. "I won't."

He tightens his grip around her then, leaning back against the stasis capsule and holding her close against him. She dozes there in the safety of his arms until he jostles her gently awake and tells her she must go back to her dormitory before she is caught. She nods, standing up, and offers him a hand up as well. He takes it, grinning, and lets her haul him to his feet. Then he catches her in a quick, warm hug, and presses a soft kiss to her temple. "I will see you on the training ground," he says. He moves to the door, unlocking and opening it before leaning out to make sure that the coast is clear before leaving.

"Sir," she says, reaching out to stop him. He looks back at her, cocking an eyebrow in inquiry, and she says, "I know that your designation is Alpha," she says. She swallows hard. "But what's your name?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know," he replies softly. "I don't think I have one any more."

"Oh," she murmurs. She bites her lip and admits, "I don't think I do, either."

He smiles slightly. "Sure you do," he tells her. "It's Darcy."

She blinks at him in shock, and suddenly she remembers: shivering on the floor of a concrete cell, staring at him as he sits in the corner across from her. She shakes her head slightly, trying to clear it, but by the time she manages it, he is already gone.

~*~

On the training ground the next day, with his words in her mind, Beta -  _ Darcy _ \-  _**Beta** _ \- considers what he had said about having a part to play in a grand game. She considers how he had rewarded Natalia on their first day for having the sense enough  _ not _ to attack him when she knew perfectly well that she could not defeat him. She considers what he had said about not telling anyone what she remembered. And she watches Natalia and Yelena spar, and thinks about how Natalia consistently bests both Yelena and Beta not because she is a  _ better _ fighter, but because she is a  _ smarter _ fighter.

She watches carefully, and she realizes suddenly what Trainer means when they say that emotions are a weakness. Yelena, when she feels herself losing, grows angry. This makes her fight harder, but not necessarily better. Sometimes, if she becomes truly desperate, she gets worse. Beta recognizes that this failing in Yelena is also a failing in herself, and it is what separates them from Natalia. Natalia is able to maintain a cool head even in the heat of a hand-to-hand grapple. She is constantly analyzing, constantly thinking one or two steps ahead of her opponent. This is why Natalia consistently beats both of them.

When Yelena is defeated, and has limped to the bench at the edge of the ground to nurse her wounds, Beta stands up and walks out onto the packed earth. Yesterday she might have looked up at Asset designation: Alpha for some acknowledgement; today she does not. She keeps her eyes on her opponent.

Natalia's eyes are flat and green as a snake. Beta gives her a slight nod of acknowledgement, which Natalia returns. And Beta begins to think.

When she fights with Natalia, she usually attacks, and unless she is armed with a distance weapon, she usually ends up on the ground. So this time, she does not attack. She waits. After a moment, Natalia recognizes her tactic and smirks slightly, then begins to ease toward her, slowly, in an arc. At first, Beta matches her step for step, and then she realizes what is happening. Natalia is moving them in a circle, trying to put the early afternoon sun in Beta's eyes. When Natalia takes her next step, Beta does not move.

Natalia feints toward her, but it is a fairly obvious feint and Beta does not take the bait. She simply stands there, smiling slightly. It doesn't take long before Natalia's blank expression edges into frustrated confusion; the red-haired girl clearly cannot figure out why Beta has not attacked. And then she grows impatient and she lunges.

Beta dodges at the last moment and punches Natalia between the shoulder blades on her way past, making the other girl stumble forward a few steps before she spins around and they face each other again. It is the last time Beta gets one over on Natalia in this fight, but she focuses on keeping her head clear, and although she can't beat Natalia, she doesn't lose as badly as Yelena did. Her obvious improvement gains her a word of praise from Asset designation: Alpha after the fight is over, and the approval in his voice is worth more to her than any fine hunting knife could be.

Asset designation: Alpha trains them every day for three months. All three of them improve exponentially. And then one day he is not there; instead, they rejoin their year-group to begin training with long-range weaponry. That night, Beta makes her way down to the basement again, and she finds precisely what she had expected to find: Asset designation: Alpha is back inside the stasis capsule, his eyes closed against the frost lining his face.

Beta sighs, feeling the loss of him constrict her heart painfully. She leans against the front of the capsule for a long time, her eyes closed, her forehead resting against the metal, wishing that she had just a moment more to say goodbye. Finally she tiptoes, presses her lips against the glass, and sneaks back upstairs to the dormitory.

This becomes her life's regular pattern: wake, eat, train, rest, sleep, occasionally sneak down to the basement to rest against the front of the stasis capsule and pretend that he is holding her in his arms. She learns to use a pistol, a shotgun, and a sniper rifle; she excels at all of them, and though she still cannot best Natalia in physical combat, her scores on the rifle range are the best in her year group, bar none.

Everything is fine until the night she is caught in the basement.

She should have remembered that there were other things in the storage room besides the two stasis pods; she should have remembered that there was always a chance that someone might need something from there. She doesn't. She gets just a little careless. And one night, she dozes off while leaning against Asset designation: Alpha's capsule. She wakes at the sound of the door opening, but it is too late; Trainer has caught her. She straightens, squares her shoulders, and prepares to accept her punishment without protest.

Trainer steers her back up the stairs and into Director Lukin's office and tells her to wait. Beta stands at parade rest before the empty desk and waits. When Director Lukin comes, he sits down at his desk and he studies Beta carefully. "It is not that I do not understand the impulse," he tells her. "But rules are rules, and order must be kept. Assets must follow orders regardless of their personal feelings and emotions."

"Yes, Director," Beta says when he pauses, obviously seeking a reply.

Director Lukin nods. "You understand that you must be punished."

"Yes, Director," Beta replies.

"You understand that you must be made an example, so that the other girls do not get the same idea."

"Yes, Director," Beta says again.

"Very well, then," Director Lukin says. He flicks his fingers toward the door. "Go back to your dormitory. Pack your things into your locker. Bring it back downstairs and wait in the hall."

Beta nods sharply. "Yes, Director." She turns and leaves the room. She goes back up to her dormitory, where all the other girls still sleep. Working in silence she strips her bed, folding the sheets and leaving them at the end of the mattress. Then she packs her few clothing items and her weapons in the little foot locker at the end of her bed. Once every trace of her existence has been erased from the tiny bunk that has been her home for the last three years, she flips the box closed. She picks it up – it isn't very heavy – and carries it downstairs.

In the facility's main hallway, there are three plain wooden chairs near the front door. These are only used by girls who are about to be punished. Beta slides her foot locker under the middle chair and seats herself upon it, her back straight and her palms resting on her thighs. She does not sleep, but she closes her eyes and calms her breathing and she rests. Whatever is going to happen will happen whether she panics or not, so she chooses not to panic.

At sunrise the girls begin to stir, and as they file down the stairs and pass through the main hallway toward the assembly hall for breakfast, they all see her. Beta hears the whispers and sees the looks of fear and sympathy and pity, and she ignores them all. She holds the face of Asset designation: Alpha in her mind, remembers how he looked when he smiled at her, the scratch of his stubble against her skin when he kissed her temple. She remembers how safe she felt in his arms.

Punishment is the first order of the day, even before food. The girls assemble in the hall, and at a word from Trainer, they troop out into the training yard. When Director Lukin comes out of his rooms, he flicks his fingers at Beta, and she stands, following him. Another Trainer retrieves her foot locker and carries it away.

Beta follows Director Lukin out into the training yard, where all the girls are assembled in a semicircle around the central post. Beta knows what to do. Without hesitation, she walks up to the post and strips off her uniform shirt. She tucks it into the waistband of her pants to keep it clean, then reaches up and braces her hands against the wood.

Director Lukin explains to the assembled girls that Beta is being punished for a flagrant violation of facility rules. He explains that a good asset, who wishes to do well in the service of Mother Russia, must always follow rules and orders, and that rules and orders are in place for the benefit of all the Soviet state. He explains that assets who cannot follow the rules must be punished, and he calls on Trainer to come and administer that punishment.

When Trainer steps forward, Beta hears a whisper of dismay run through the watching audience, and she wonders what could be so bad. At the first blow, she finds out: she had expected to be strapped, but Trainer is wielding a cat o' nine tails. The pain is intense at first, but around the fifth blow, Beta finds her mind escaping to a faraway place and she goes numb.

After fifteen blows, Trainer steps back, and Director Lukin says something else to the assembled crowd; Beta cannot hear it. She stands very still, braced against the post, and feels the blood running down her back. Once Director Lukin is gone and the assembled girls have returned to the hall for breakfast, Trainer comes to Beta's side and helps her let go of the post. He takes her to the room where they go for medical help if they need it, and the nurse there cleans the cuts on Beta's back and stops the bleeding. She gives Beta a cup of tea with something in it that makes her sleep.

Beta spends three days in the medical room, drinking tea that makes her sleep and waiting for her back to heal. Once the nurse says that the scabs have fully formed, she is allowed to stand up again, and Trainer comes for her. She is taken downstairs into the basement, but not into the storage room; instead, into the room across the hall.

She sits down in the chair without having to be told. She takes the bite guard into her mouth without protest. She makes a soft sound of pain when she is pushed against the leather back of the chair, and then the restraints clamp around her arms. The armature whirls above her head, and she sees the arc of electricity on the nodes. She remembers this. She closes her eyes, setting her jaw and taking a deep breath as it clamps down around her head.

Fire explodes inside her brain. She chokes on a gasp, her jaw clenching around the guard in her mouth, and then she screams and screams and screams.

When it stops, she sags in her bonds, the pain in her back absolutely nothing compared to the blessed relief of the  _ absence _ of pain in her head. Someone takes the guard out of her mouth and she pants freely as the armature above her head whirs away. Someone steps up and peers into her eyes, and says, "Reset."

She feels information slotting itself into her brain. The man in front of her is Technician. The other man is Trainer. Trainer says, "What is your name?"

She replies, "Asset designation: Beta."

"What is your function?"

She searches her memory. "Parameter: function undefined."

"Who is your soul mate?"

She searches her memory. "Asset designation: Alpha."

"What are your orders?"

She searches her memory. "Active orders: undefined. Standing orders: Obey Handler. Obey Technician. Obey Trainer. Obey Asset designation: Alpha."

"Good," Trainer says. "Come along."

Technician has to help her out of the chair, because her legs will not cooperate with her orders. He helps her get her feet underneath her, and then he helps her out of the room and across the hall into a small storage room. She sees the two metal capsules with glass windows in them; inside one of them, she can see Asset designation: Alpha. He appears to be in stasis. The second capsule is empty. Trainer goes over and opens it. Technician helps her across the room and guides her to stand inside the capsule. Trainer says, "You have done very well, Beta. We're very pleased with your progress."

"Thank you, sir," she says. She wonders why her back hurts so badly. Surely if they are pleased with her, she wasn't punished. She must have been damaged, and that's why she's being put away.

Trainer says, "When you wake, there will be missions for you. You will be a great blessing in service to the Soviet Union."

"Yes, sir," she says.

Technician closes the door of the capsule; she hears the latch lock on the outside. There is a moment of nothing, and then a moment of cold so intense that it literally steals her breath. Her eyes close reflexively against the ice.

~*~

**January 1973**

**Dresden**

The first thing she hears is his voice saying, "Guten morgen, кукла."

"Guten morgen, Chef," she replies automatically, slowly blinking her eyes open to focus on his familiar face. "Wo bin ich?"

"Dresden," he replies. "Can you sit up?"

"Ja," she says. It turns out that she's wrong, though, and he has to help her get upright. She gets her first look at their new German accommodations and isn't terribly impressed; it seems that they are sharing a six-by-six cell with a set of bunk beds and a stainless steel toilet and sink. They are sitting together on the bottom bunk, and she hisses in surprise and pain when he leans her against the concrete wall behind them.

He pulls her forward again immediately. "Your back?"

She nods. He shifts her and lifts up the back of the plain white men's undershirt she is wearing. He gives a low whistle. "Shit, кукла," he says, his voice low. "What the hell happened to you?"

"I don't know," she admits. "I thought perhaps I was damaged, and that was why they put me away."

"You're damaged, all right," he says. "Damaged with a cat o' nine tails, judging by the marks on you. What the hell did you do?"

She leans forward, resting her face in her hands. "I... I don't remember," she says. "I... I was trained outside of Leningrad. You were there. And there were other girls. I don't remember." She runs a hand through her hair, then shakes her head. "When they put me in the capsule, Trainer said I'd done well. He said they were pleased. I don't know what I did." This is confusing. She doesn't like being confused.

He sighs heavily. "Hard to avoid doing it again, then," he mutters. "Idiots." He shifts on the bed, helping her to lie down on her side.

She looks up at him. "How long have you been awake?"

He shrugs. "A few days. They wanted me fully functional before they woke you." He pauses, glancing toward the door, and then he looks back down at her. "They're going to do some medical procedures. I don't know. Something I've already had, apparently."

She sighs. "Great," she mutters.

"It'll give your back a chance to heal, at least," he points out. "You can't heal in cryo."

"That's true," she agrees, brightening a little bit. "I'd prefer to be undamaged."

"Yeah," he replies, grinning just a little bit. "I prefer you undamaged, too."

She blinks at him, her mouth dropping open just a little bit when she realizes he is joking. "Chefchen!" she exclaims. Then she laughs, teasing back, her eyes dancing. "I'm too young for you."

"You're not as young as you were," he replies, grinning back. "When we met, you were only twelve or so."

"Really?" She hums, thinking about this. "I don't remember."

"I do," he replies. His hand cups her cheek. "I'll remember for you."

Sometime later, Technician comes for her. He takes her to a room and straps her down to a table, heedless of her sore back. She watches wordlessly as needles are slipped under her skin and attached to tubes, as electrodes are pasted to her head and her chest, and as men in white coats who are not Technicians move around her, discussing whatever it is that they are doing in words that she does not understand.

When they begin pumping a blue fluid into her veins, fire spreads throughout her body. It steals her breath so thoroughly that she cannot even scream, she can only lie there and sweat and shudder in pain, falling into delirium as whatever the fluid is travels slowly throughout her body. She drifts in and out of consciousness, occasionally rousing to respond to a question from Technician or a white-coated man, but mostly drifting unaware on a haze of pain until, at last, it begins to recede and she is able to rejoin the waking world.

The first thing she notices is that her back doesn't hurt any more. As Technician unstraps her and helps her to sit up, she takes a risk and asks how long she has been out.

"Two days," he tells her.

"Huh." She shrugs her shoulders, feeling the lack of pain, and stands when instructed to. She is pleased to note that she isn't even dizzy, and she follows Technician through the halls and back to the cell where Asset designation: Alpha waits. Technician lets her in and then closes and locks the door behind her.

Asset designation: Alpha stands up. "Jesus, Darcy," he whispers, reaching for her. "They kept you so long. I was afraid they did something to you."

"They did," she replies. She turns her back to him and pulls up the back of her shirt. "See?"

She feels the gentle touch of his fingers sliding on her skin. "It's totally gone," he murmurs. "Not even a scar." He looks up at her, and she meets his eyes as she looks at him over her shoulder. "They've made you like me," he murmurs.

"News flash," she replies, pulling her shirt back down and turning to face him with a grim smile. "I was already like you."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YOU GUYS. YOU ARE SERIOUSLY THE BEST. I literally cannot believe the hit/kudos/bookmark counter. I CAN'T WITH Y'ALL. I legitimately thought that, like, maybe five people would read this thing and you're just. UGH. I AM OVERWHELMED AND I LOVE ALL OF YOU. So here, have some feels.

She gets a few days in a training facility to get used to her changed body. She finds that her senses are enhanced, that she is stronger and faster than she was before, and that her reflexes are improved. Asset designation: Alpha puts her through her paces mercilessly, working her as hard as any Trainer ever did at the facility outside Leningrad, until he pronounces her adequate.

She struggles to keep her face smooth when he makes his pronouncement to Director Lukin, who has apparently come all the way from Leningrad to see about her progress. "Only adequate?" the director inquires after Asset designation: Alpha says it. "You declared the last one superior."

"Natalia  _ is _ superior," Asset designation: Alpha replies. "Asset Beta has not yet reached that level of accomplishment. And she will never have Natalia's skillset." Beta tries not to bristle at the (probably) unintended slight.

Director Lukin tilts his bald head, studying Asset designation: Alpha as though trying to decide whether or not he is being disrespectful. "Explain," he finally demands.

"Natalia is suited for infiltration and espionage. She has the skills for it, and she has the inclination toward it. Asset Beta has neither." He pauses, clearly struggling to explain. "To compare the two, sir, is to compare a hammer to a screwdriver." He makes a frustrated face.

But Lukin's expression is one of understanding. "They are tools meant for different uses," he clarifies.

"Yes, sir," Asset designation: Alpha agrees, looking a little relieved that his point has gotten across.

Lukin nods. "So you say that Asset Beta is... adequate. In what style?"

"Currently, in any style," Asset designation: Alpha replies. "At the moment, I would expect her to perform  _ adequately _ at whatever task she was assigned." He pauses, carefully gauging his words and his audience before speaking again. "However, with extremely focused training, she could become superior."

Beta squares her shoulders and straightens her back just a little bit, trying to look like she is already superior. Lukin glances at her, then back at Asset designation: Alpha. "Do you have a suggestion?"

Asset designation: Alpha says, "She's suited to my skillset, sir."

"You want to train her to be a sharpshooter?" Lukin asks.

"It is my opinion as an operative," Asset designation: Alpha said carefully, "that, given focused training, Asset Beta would serve as well as I do at the function I fulfill. And that, together, we could be of great service to the Soviet State."

Lukin looks thoughtful at that, and Beta privately thinks that it was a stroke of genius for Asset designation: Alpha to drag in the idea of service to the State like that; it is obviously something that Director Lukin and the various Trainers and Technicians have thought was important. Those kinds of strings, on people who care about those sorts of things, can be very useful to tug on sometimes.

Personally, Beta could not possibly care less about States, Soviet or otherwise. The only thing Beta cares about is Asset designation: Alpha. She has a feeling that Asset designation: Alpha doesn't really care about the Soviet State, either. But she knows that he cares about her, and so she carefully maintains her blank expression while Director Lukin considers Asset designation: Alpha's words.

"So," Lukin says after a moment of thought. "You want to train her, yes? Mold and shape her after your own image, and then... you could serve together."

"A team is sometimes of more use than a single operative working alone," Asset designation: Alpha offers.

Lukin chuckles softly and glances over at her. "Did you know, Asset Beta, that if you hatch goose eggs in an incubator, they assume that the first moving thing that they see within a few hours of their hatching is their mother?"

Beta blinks. "No, sir," she says. She's not sure she's ever actually seen a goose close up, though of course she's seen them flying in the air many times. And she's  _ really _ not sure what baby geese have to do with Asset designation: Alpha training her to match his own skillset.

"It is true," Lukin assures her. "A man named Lorenz did a study. He hatched baby geese in an incubator and made sure that he was the first moving thing that they saw. Invariably, the babies would imprint upon him - or perhaps his galoshes, it's not certain - and he was often seen walking about, followed by lines of little honking baby geese."

Beta is unsure how to react to this, so she waits.

After a moment, Lukin's eyes flick back to Asset designation: Alpha. "I suppose that I could have less useful geese," he finally says. "Very well, Winter Soldier, I will approve this plan. The girl is yours." His gaze returns to Beta. "What are your orders?"

"Active orders: undefined," she recites. "Standing orders: Obey Director Lukin. Obey Handler. Obey Technicians. Obey Trainers. Obey Asset designation: Alpha."

"Very good," Lukin says. "Asset designation: Alpha, code name Winter Soldier, is going to train you on a new skill set. While you are training with him, you obey only his orders and mine. Do you understand?"

"Active orders: Training mission. Obey Asset designation: Alpha, code name Winter Soldier. Obey Director Lukin. Disregard all other orders until training mission is complete."

"Excellent," Lukin says, nodding. He glances at Asset designation: Alpha and smirks just a little bit, switching from German to Russian. "Зимний солдат и Снегу́рка, Да?"

"Да," Winter Soldier replies. He does not smile.

They get one hour to prepare. Winter Soldier double-times her to a supply room and outfits them both with cold-weather gear and secrets as many weapons on their bodies as he can. He also manages to find matches and a small medical kit that fits in one of the utility pockets on the leg of her pants. At the end of that hour, they report to Director Lukin's office. They are met there by the team that will transport them to their starting point: the northernmost edge of the city. "The purpose of this exercise," Lukin explained, "is for you to disappear. You will have one day in which to do this. After that day, our men will begin hunting you. If you succeed in remaining uncaptured for one week, the exercise will be considered a success, and you may continue training as the Winter Soldier sees fit. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," they reply in unison.

"Good. You may go."

They both nod sharply, turn, and follow their transport team out of the office and through the facility to the garage. They are loaded into a van with three Soldiers - one driving, two sitting in the back to guard them - and driven through the late afternoon to the north end of town. Once they are in a secluded place, the driver pulls to the side of the road and says, "End of the line."

One of the Soldiers gets up and goes to open the door in the back of the van. Winter Soldier waits until he has his back to them, then swiftly disables him, dropping him unconscious but alive onto the van's floor. Beta takes care of the second Soldier, who was sitting next to her, while Winter Soldier goes for the driver. It doesn't take long; they weren't expecting resistance, and the sudden attack shocked them long enough for the Assets to gain the upper hand.

They relieve the three Soldiers of their weaponry and anything useful they might be carrying, including all of their money, and then they dump them outside the van. Beta closes the doors and they both climb into the front seat. Winter Soldier says, "Do you know how to drive?"

Beta shakes her head. "I don't think so."

"I'll teach you before we dump it." And he does; about thirty minutes out from Dresden, he stops and they switch places, and he patiently teaches her how to shift gears and work the clutch, and he only shouts _Jesus, Darcy!_ once when she nearly sideswipes a Volkswagen.

Once she feels like she can focus on driving and carry on a conversation at the same time, she says, "Why do you call me that?"

"Call you what?" he asks.

"Darcy," she says. "When we are alone, you speak English with me, and you called me Darcy. And I think you've done it before, but I'm not sure. Why?"

"Because it's your name," he explains. "They take it away from you every time they wipe you for storage, but they haven't taken it away from me. I think maybe they forgot that I know it."

She drives from just outside of Wilsdruff to Nerchau; he takes the wheel there because it's getting dark and he doesn't want her to cause an accident. They stop in Leipzig for supplies and food, and Winter Soldier finds a man willing to trade the van for a 1964 Trabant. This man carefully turns his back while they pack their supplies and weaponry into the Trabbi, and then he drives away first in order to avoid being able to say what direction they might have gone in. Winter Soldier swaps out the license tags on the Trabbi with those from a nearby Zastava Koral, and then they climb into the car and drive away.

Winter Soldier makes a soft humming noise as they putter north through Leipzig. Beta raises an eyebrow at him. "What?"

"Nothing," he says. "Just thinking how nice it was of him to leave us with a full tank of gasoline."

Beta laughs then, and then she laughs again because it feels so good to do so. She can't remember if she's ever laughed before; even in the dormitories with the other girls, there was never really anything to laugh about. It wasn't that life was terrible; it was just harsh and determined and deadly serious. So she relishes the opportunity to be here, now, in this tiny little car with Asset designation: Alpha, codename Winter Soldier.

She is struck by a thought, and she looks up at him. "Do you have a name?"

He shakes his head, his eyes never leaving the print of their headlights on the road. She thinks they might be heading toward Berlin, but Potsdam is also in this direction. "Not any more," he says. "I think maybe I did, once, but..." He trails off and shrugs.

Beta understands. She understands the way nobody else possibly could, not even Natalia or Yelena. They could understand about training and missions and serving the State, but they could never understand what it means to know that they have taken parts of you out, and not even know which parts are missing. She understands that whatever has been done to her, it was done in service of the State, and she is fine with that. She understands that she is a soldier of the State, that her life is meant to be given in its service. A tidy house with a little root cellar and a plot of land for farming and a tiny brood of children will never be a thing that she has.

She reaches out and takes his right hand in her left. She turns it, letting the moonlight shine in through the windshield and illuminate the words scrawled on his arm - oddly enough, in English. _Those are the words on my soul mark. I - I think you're my soul mate._ She smiles slightly, and she laces her fingers between his on the cracked leather, and she relaxes in her seat, humming a tune she only half-remembers as she stares out into the East German night. She will never have the quiet life with a husband and children on some collective farm somewhere that she might have had, but she has him. And whether he has a name or not, he is enough. He is all she needs.

~*~

He teaches her how to pick a lock and how to disable an external burglar alarm, and they raid a clothing shop in Wittenberg, exchanging the gear they left the base in for new things. She goes automatically for a black-on-black color scheme, like what she had been wearing, but he stops her, steering her instead toward a rack of brightly colored ski jackets. She stares at him, a jewel-toned green parka in her hands. "Are you kidding me?" she asks.

He shakes his head, pulling a dove gray off the rack for himself. "No," he says. "That's what girls your age wear, the bright colors. It's expected."

She blinks in surprise. "They do?" She looks down at the parka, then back up at him. Finally, she shrugs. "Okay." She pulls the parka on to check the fit, pleased when it turns out to be extremely soft on the inside. It reaches almost to her knees and envelops her warmly. "Oh, say, this is pretty boss," she comments. "I like this." She glances up at him with an eyebrow twitched. "Think they'll let me keep it?"

He snorts as he shrugs on his own thick coat, the metal of his arm disappearing beneath the soft gray fabric. She pokes around the dark store until she finds a rack of leather gloves, pulling out a pair for each of them before returning to his side. "Here," she says. "These will hide your hand, too."

"Good thinking," he praises her, tugging the gloves on.

They obtain lined jeans, sturdy leather boots, and winter caps that match things the rest of the populace will be wearing and look almost nothing like what they were wearing when they left the facility. Winter Soldier dumps their old clothing into a trash bin. He finds a battered blue Moskvich 402 sedan on the next street and gives Beta a quick lesson on hotwiring, and they leave the Trabbi in its place, stopping on the way out of town to swap the license tags out again.

From Wittenberg it is nearly a straight shot into Potsdam, and they spend the night there in a tiny, filthy back-street hotel room, curled up together on the narrow bed for warmth because the building has no heat. In the morning, they get breakfast and then leave town, giving West Berlin a wide berth before puttering into East Berlin, where Winter Soldier sells the Moskvich to a woman who wants to defect to the West and all their guns to a Polish man who plans to smuggle them into Czechoslovakia. He gives half the money to Beta, and she hides part of it in her brassiere and the rest in her boots.

They spend the day knocking around Berlin, doing the things that people do in cities: peering into shop windows and stopping for a coffee in a small cafe, walking in parks in the weak sunshine. The weather is very mild for January, so they aren't alone in any of this, and once or twice, Beta almost forgets that this can't last.

They get a slightly better hotel room that evening; the building has heat, at least, even if it's still fairly cold in their room. When they slide into bed together that night, though, Beta doesn't turn her back; instead, she reaches for him and pulls him close, leaning up and pressing her mouth to his.

He rolls her onto her back and braces himself above her, kissing her warm and slow, exploring her mouth with his tongue and teaching her how to explore his. When she's whimpering, he finally releases her lips, pressing his to the side of her jaw and sliding them up to the hinge at her ear, then down her neck to her collarbone. He pulls the neck of her shirt down, exposing her soul mark, and presses his lips to the words there, kissing and licking his way across from the first letter to the last.

And then he lifts his head and presses his lips to hers again, but this time it's chaste and he pulls away from her, shaking his head. "We can't," he murmurs when she tries to pull him back.

"Why not?" she demands. "There are no orders against it. They know you're my soul mate."

"You're still a child, кукла," he says gently, reaching up to stroke the side of her face.

"I'm almost eighteen," she replies. "Or maybe I am eighteen, I'm not sure. Since I don't know when my birthday is." She props herself up on one elbow. "But I know I'm almost there. And besides, I don't care how old I am. I'm old enough to train and old enough to steal and fight and maybe kill, and I'm old enough to be put away and taken out again, so why am I not old enough for this, for you?" She pauses, staring at him, and then she says, "Oh. Oh, I see." And she pushes away from him, scrambling out of the bed.

He follows her. "What do you mean, you see? What do you see? What does that mean?"

She turns her back to him, reaching for the jeans she'd left crumpled in the floor. "I'm not too young. You don't want me." She begins jerking the poorly-made denim up over her legs. "At least tell me the truth. Don't make up excuses."

He grabs her hands, turning her to face him. "Stop. Darcy. Кукла. Stop."

"Let me go!" She tries to pull away from him, but he has her by the wrists now, and her newly-enhanced body might be strong enough to break away from his flesh grip, but his metal hand is stronger still, and she only manages to bruise herself. "Stop it, let me go!"

"I won't, not until you stop whatever it is you're doing and  _ talk to me. _ "

She clenches her fists and swings at him, but he blocks her easily, catching her wrist again and transferring it to the other hand. Now he is gripping both of her wrists with his metal hand, and he drags her body up against his, reaching behind her and sinking his flesh hand into her hair. He gets a good, tight grip and yanks her head back, forcing her to look up at him. And he blinks in shock when he realizes that she is crying. "Кукла," he says again. "What's going on? Why are you crying?"

"I'm not crying!" she insists, denying the evidence of the tears spilling out of her eyes. "Let me go, I'm leaving!"

"And where will you go, idiot?" he snaps, losing patience, the words tumbling out in angry Russian. "How long do you think it will be before they track us to Berlin? And what do you think will be the punishment for losing this little game, hmm? Do you think there will be a loss of points on some tally sheet in a file Lukin keeps in his desk? Hmm? Or maybe you think it will be something mildly unpleasant, like a strapping, or even a beating with the cat o' nine tails like the one you don't remember in Leningrad, that turned your back into the ground hamburger that it was when they woke you last week. Is that what you think?"

She stares at him, her eyes wide and still full of tears, her breath coming in short gasps. He snorts at her. "I thought you were intelligent enough to understand this already, considering that we live basically the exact same life, but apparently I was mistaken. So let me break this one down for you into very small words that you'll understand. If we lose this game, if we fail at this exercise, we both suffer. I don't  _ think _ that they would kill us, but I am quite sure that the chair would be the least of our concerns. And there is no me-or-you in this matter. If you fail, it will be because I have not adequately trained you." He lets her go then, almost shoving her back and away from him. "So you can go on and have your little tantrum and storm out of here if you like. But ask yourself before you go, how long you think it will be before they catch you."

He walks away from her then, returning to the bed and tossing himself onto it, his back against the wall and his eyes flat and cold. She can't stand it, that look on his face directed at her, and she turns away from him, crossing the room in three short strides and curling herself up in the corner with her back to him, pressing her forehead against her knees. Not only doesn't he want her, but she's a burden on him. If it wasn't for her, if she wasn't there, he would be fine - a shadow among shadows, vanishing into nothing, and they would never find him, never punish him, he would be fine, more than fine, he would be perfect, if it wasn't for her. No wonder he doesn't want her.

She doesn't realize that she is sobbing until he kneels down beside her, and his words, when they come, are in his gentle, warm English. "C'mere," he says softly, and he sits down beside her and pulls her into his lap, wrapping his arms around her and holding her close in his warmth. "Shh, stop cryin', now." His flesh hand rubs at her back even as her fists clench in his shirt, holding him tight because even if he doesn't want her, she still wants him, desperately, and she doesn't understand why. She only knows that she needs him, that if she didn't have him, her life would be so empty that she might not be able to go on.

"Please," she manages to sob. "I don't know why but tell me, tell me what to do, I'll do anything, please."

He doesn't reply immediately; instead, he stands, lifting her in his arms, and he moves to the bed, seating himself more comfortably and arranging her in his lap. He never lets her go, though, and by the time he is done, her sobs have slowed to wet hiccups. He lifts her chin with his hand and wipes at her face with the hem of his shirt. Finally, he speaks. "Darcy," he says softly, "I need you to tell me what's goin' on inside of your head. I know you pretty much inside and out at this point, but sweetheart, I can't figure out what's goin' on with you right now."

She looks away, ashamed. "I don't understand why you don't want me," she finally mutters.

He tips her face up to look at him again. "I never said I don't," he told her. "Did I?"

"But you said - "

"I said you're a child," he told her. "It ain't right. None of this is right." He sighs, leaning back against the wall and closing his eyes for a moment. "You oughta be, I dunno, in school somewhere or somethin'. Goin' out to pictures with boys. Not..." He shakes his head.

"Yeah, well, I'm not, am I?" she points out. She shifts in his lap suddenly, straddling his thighs and sitting down on his knees. "Look at me, Chefchen. If I ought to be out with boys, where should you ought to be? Hmm? On some farm somewhere with a wife and kids? Working in a factory in Zwickau building Trabants? Teaching school in Moscow?"

He stares into the distance for a moment. "Brooklyn," he says suddenly.

She blinks at him. "Brooklyn?"

He shakes his head sharply, as though trying to clear it. He shrugs. "I don't know," he admits.

"Brooklyn." She laughs, and it's short and kind of ugly. "Wouldn't that be something, Chefchen? If we were both Americans?"

He shakes his head again, more slowly. "Don't even joke about that," he says darkly. Then he cups her face again, his thumbs wiping at the salty trails of tears on her cheeks. "Is that what this is about, then? I tell you I think you're too young, and you think that means I don't want you?"

"Don't you?" she asks, and everything about her is challenging everything about him.

He is still for a long moment, studying her face, before shaking his head. "Goddammit," he mutters. "You're barely seventeen if you're a day, how the fuck do you do this to me?"

She smirks, just a little bit. "You're my soul mate, Chefchen," she says softly. "What do you think you do to me?"

He lunges then, bearing her down onto the mattress. "I'll show you," he whispers into her ear.

And he does. Beta -  _ Darcy _ , this is something that she will keep for her secret self - cannot ever remember being touched with such gentleness, such reverence. He strips her of her clothing and strips himself of his, he lets her learn his body so that she will not be afraid, and then he learns hers. He brings her pleasure such as she had never imagined could exist with his hands and then again with his mouth, and then when she lies there panting and shivering in the cool air, he covers her with his body and he enters her, and her mind explodes even as her fingers clutch at him and her mouth meets his. And in the aftermath, he holds her tight against him under the blanket and he whispers sweet words into her ear in a hundred languages, and she knows that she was foolish to have doubted him. And finally, wrapped in the warm safety of his arms, she sleeps.

In the morning they cross the city on foot, steal a little red Škoda 440, and circle around Berlin, bypassing Potsdam and heading west toward Brandenburg, and then south toward Magdeburg. She asks him why, and he explains. "The cars we stole," he tells her, "can be traced. Everything we did until yesterday, in some way, could be tracked to us. The van we traded for the Trabbi, when they find it, the man will tell them about the Trabbi. He will give them the license number. They will discover that I switched the license for another, and they will track that. It will lead them to Wittenberg. They will find out about the Moskvich, they will track it. They will discover the woman who bought it, because she will not defect."

"How do you know?" Beta demanded.

"She is too afraid of dying," he explained. "She will never go through with it. They will have thus tracked us to Berlin. They will assume we are still going north; they may lose a day continuing to try and pick up a trail in the city, or they may simply continue north. Either way, they will expect us next in Neuruppin or Neustrelitz, or possibly Schwedt, if they think we're going to try for Poland. But because we have so far gone north and east, they will not expect us to turn west and south." He gnawed on his lower lip for a moment. "The best place to hide would have been in West Berlin; they would never think to look for us there. But the border crossing is dangerous with falsified papers; with none, we would never make it."

It takes them most of the day to get to Erfurt, largely because they stop twice to change cars on the way, but once they get there, they take a room in a lovely bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town and they speak Russian-accented German. They give their names as Alexei and Yuliya and they claim to be newlyweds and they stay there for two nights.

On the fifth day of their exercise, they check out of the bed and breakfast, get into their current blue Trabant, and drive away toward Leipzig. There is a shop on the way, in a town called Weissenfels, that sells camping gear; because it is Sunday afternoon, the shops are all closed, so he plays lookout while she checks for burglar alarms - there are none - and jimmies open the back door of the shop.

They load up on camping gear - everything they could possibly need, from firestarters to cooking equipment to tarps to a very nice two-man tent, and knapsacks to carry everything - and they abandon the car on the edge of town and disappear into the forests of southern Saxony.

"The thing about it," he says, about three hours into their hike, "is that you have to know when to get completely off the grid."

"Is that what we're doing?" she asks. "I thought we were getting completely fucking lost."

"That, too," he admits. He checks his compass. "I wonder how hard they'll panic if we're _late_ getting back."

"Let's not find out," she replies. "I'd rather not be shot."

They spend two nights in the forest, hiking their way back toward Dresden. As she has done since that second night in Berlin, she wears the persona of Beta during the day, when he teaches her things like how to navigate with a compass and how to read track, how to sit in a nest for hours waiting for a target to pass by and how to go so still and silent that she might as well disappear. He tells her not to worry about the hastiness of these lessons; they are going to win this little game, and there will be more time for perfecting the new skills he is teaching her.

And when the darkness falls, when the forest is silent around them except for the tiny shuffles of the nighttime animals, and they are closed up securely in their well-concealed tent, she is Darcy; for him, she is Darcy, and he breathes her name against her skin and he teaches her so many other things.

On the seventh day, they stroll into Dresden openly, walking side by side along the main highway. They do not smile, but they glow with pride and success. They stop at a sidewalk cafe to have breakfast, sitting far enough away from the other patrons that their woodsy smell will not offend, and they blatantly enjoy boiled eggs and wurst and cheese and bread and jam and drink cup after cup of fragrant, dark-roasted coffee. Once they have eaten and drunk their fill, they pay and shoulder their knapsacks, and they make their way through the city toward the Zwinger. On Sophienstraße they are approached by a man who greets them with one of the appropriate signs; Winter Soldier responds with the correct countersign and the man leads them into a side street, where they climb into a van and are taken back to the facility.

Director Lukin is waiting in his office when they arrive, and he is smiling. He stands up when they enter. "Well done," he tells them, and Beta detects sincerity in his voice, which is a bit of a surprise, but a welcome one. He listens to them debrief, and he confirms Winter Soldier's prediction that the trail did in fact go cold in Berlin. "Agent Strauss thought you might have gone over the Wall," he offers.

Winter Soldier nods. "I thought about it," he admits. "But it would have been too difficult for both of us to go and come back again without detection, and we couldn't afford to get trapped over there."

With another round of congratulations, Lukin dismisses them to bathe and rest. Once clean, they are returned to their little cell with the bunk beds, and Darcy sleeps alone for the first time since Berlin. But she doesn't mind; Winter Soldier has promised that they will go out on more training missions, and she can be patient. She has him with her, and that's what matters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Зимний солдат и Снегу́рка, Да?" - Translated, "The Winter Soldier and the Snow Maiden, yes?" 
> 
> In case you are unfamiliar, the Snow Maiden is a Russian fairy tale about a child made of snow. The name of the snow-girl is Snegurka (Снегу́рка in Cyrillic), and the diminutive form of that name is Snegurochka. 
> 
> For U.S. readers who remember the eighties, a Zastava Koral is also known as a Yugo. ;)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Beta is trained and goes on her first mission, and her self-defense protocols get tested.

**February 1973**

**Saxony, DDR**

Lukin gives them three months, at first.

They are required to check in once a week via radio, and to carry tracking devices at all times, but otherwise they are set loose on the districts of Dresden, Leipzig, and Karl-Marx-Stadt, to go where they will and do what they can. Winter Soldier trains her, and he trains her hard. He is almost vicious, at times, because pain is an excellent motivator. So are cold and hunger and thirst.

He takes her into the wilderness at first, because he says cities are too easy, with resources at hand everywhere that can simply be stolen. He teaches her to hunt for food. She doesn't realize at first that he is training her to kill things that aren't human beings, so that the first time she has to kill a person she will already be blooded and it won't be such a shock.

She learns to eat what she kills, and she learns to kill because otherwise she goes hungry. She learns to field dress an animal, to take what can be used and bury the rest downwind from her camp. She learns not to shy away from blood, from bone, from brain matter. She learns all the ways to avoid causing pain at death. She learns to kill clean, with a single bullet, up close and from a distance.

She learns to navigate with a compass and a map, and she learns to tell directions by the sun and moon and stars. She learns how to set up a camp that is nearly undetectable from more than ten or so feet away. She learns how to move carefully to avoid leaving tracks. She learns to locate a natural blind and to sit in it for hours without moving and without falling asleep, waiting for game to make its way into her sights. She learns to set traps and snares for small game, and to catch and clean fish, and even (in one memorable instance) how to pluck the feathers off a bird. (Far too much effort, she decides, for far too little reward. If at all possible, she will avoid birds.)

By the time their first three months are over, she is confident in her skills. When he asks her how confident, she replies, "Well, I wouldn't go running off trying to fight a bear or anything, but, you know, I could probably find my way to civilization if I had to."

"Good," he says. "Do it." And when her back is turned, he vanishes, leaving her with a rifle, a pistol, a compass, and a book of matches.

She grins.

Three days later, he steps out of an alley in Karl-Marx-Stadt and joins her on the street. "You were supposed to go to Dresden," he says.

"I'm getting there," she replies. "Karl-Marx-Stadt was closer, and I was tired of walking, so I decided to take the train."

He frowns at her, dragging her into the next alley and shoving her up against a wall. "Don't get cute with me, кукла," he snarls in German. "This isn't a game."

"I know it isn't a game!" she snarls back in English, shoving him away from her. "We have two days before we have to be back, and the run of all of Saxony. So what is your problem?"

"You have to be careful, кукла," he mutters, and suddenly he reaches out and grabs her, pulling her to him and holding her close. "You have to be careful. If they think you're getting too independent, they'll stop you. They'll punish you if they think you're going to rebel or something."

"But aren't we more effective if we think for ourselves?" she asks, looking up at him.

"Sure," he replies. "But if we think  _too much,_ кукла, that becomes a problem for them." He gives a soft, ugly laugh. "If we think too much, we might decide to go do something else with our lives."

She blinks. "But... what else would we do?"

He shrugs, slinging his human arm around her and tugging her out of the alley. "I dunno," he confesses. "Be honest, I can't imagine doin' anything else. We do what we do, you know? Somebody has to, and I guess it's righteous even if it's dirty."

"Me either," she admits. "I mean... sometimes I wonder, sure, what would it be like if we weren't us, you know? Maybe I could be a nurse or a teacher or have babies." She grins, hip-checking him. "But then I look around and I think well, you know, we make it so everyone else can do these things. And as long as you're here, that's good enough for me."

They stop in front of a street musician and he spins her around in a quick dance, grinning at her. "And as long as you're here," he murmurs right before he kisses her, "that's good enough for me, too."

~*~

**June 1973**

**Dresden**

Lukin gives them another month to do urban fieldwork and then he calls them in. "You have a mission," he tells them.

He gives them a file and tells them to read it on the way. And then he says to Beta, "If you perform well on this mission, you will be qualified for an upgrade."

She blinks. "An upgrade, sir?"

"Yes. Like Winter Soldier's arm. We have something very special planned for you, if you earn it."

She straightens, excitement coursing through her. An upgrade! She does not smile, but she does nod firmly. "Yes, sir!"

Three hours later, Winter Soldier and Beta board a cargo plane bound for the Soviet Union. The target is a man called Petras Galinis. He is a professor of history at a Jesuit university in Vilnius, Lithuania, and he is teaching dissidence. Those who make the decisions have handed down the directive that Petras Galinis must be terminated.

But there are special circumstances to this termination. Galinis has a wife, and she has been complicit in his actions, so she must die as well. But he also has children, two of them, who might be of service to the state. They are to be extracted and turned over to the local Soviet authorities.

She has never seen Winter Soldier go into mission mode before. He is distant, cold; his eyes are flat and blank, and Beta feels a shiver go up her spine. This man is not her soul mate, but he is a man she knows. She has seen him before. She remembers a copse of bushes, a gunshot, the sound of a car's brakes screaming. Those cold, cold eyes looking at her, dismissing her, rejecting her and walking away.

She shakes her head once, sharply. She doesn't remember that. That's ridiculous. Why would she remember that?

She sits back against the wall of the transport plane just as he does, pretends to be as distant and disaffected as he is. She has a feeling that she isn't fooling anyone, but no one says anything to her, which is probably for the best.

When they arrive in Lithuania, they are met by a small team of backup and taken by van to a safe house on the outskirts of Vilnius. Here, Handler gives directions, but Beta ignores him; her active orders instruct her to obey Winter Soldier and Director Lukin and no others. She waits for Winter Soldier's instructions, and when he gives her a look and gestures to the tactical gear on the table before her. Only then does she begin stripping out of her day-to-day clothing and pulling on the heavier-duty garments.

She changes her pants first, setting aside the olive-green sweatpants and pulling on the heavy leather. It fits her perfectly, and she wonders when her measurements were taken. She pulls her shirt off over her head, dropping it on top of her sweatpants; a moment later, the plain cotton bra she wears for day-to-day is with it, and she's pulling on the well-constructed binding bra that was in the pile. She doesn't notice the reactions from the men on the backup team until she hears Winter Soldier snarl and sees a knife appear in his hand.

One of the black-clad men jumps back with a yelp. "Put that away!" he shouts. "Petrovich, make him put it away!"

"I'll put it away in your throat if you try to touch her again," Winter Soldier snarls. "She's mine."

Handler speaks. "Put it away, Soldier. Morovich, you see the mark on her skin. Why would you put your hands on another man's woman?"

"He's supposed to be..." Morovich waves a hand. "A robot or something!"

Handler snorts. "Obviously you misunderstood the mission briefing," he says. "Keep your hands off the assets. That goes for all of you." He looks around at the men, even as Beta tugs on her uniform top and begins unlacing her boots. "This is your one warning," Handler says. "The Assets are not to be molested in any way. If you break that rule, what happens next is on you. Understood?"

The backup team all nod, and as Beta stamps her feet into her boots, Winter Soldier finally puts away his knife and returns to the task of arming himself. Beta ties her boots and begins tightening the straps of her armor and checking all the fastenings; once she's satisfied with that, she follows Winter Soldier's lead and begins to arm herself. She gets knives in her sleeves and knives in her boots and she gets two pistols on thigh holsters.

There are five items left on the table: two masks designed to cover the lower half of the face, two sets of tinted goggles, and the long range rifle. Winter Soldier picks up the smaller of the two masks and turns to her. His fingers are gentle against her skin as he puts it on her, running the strap beneath the thick braid of her hair, and then passes her the smaller set of goggles. She watches him pick up his own mask and put it on, watches how his nimble fingers work the clasps. He puts on his goggles, and so does she. Then he picks up the rifle and holds it out to her.

She looks up at him for a moment, but of course his mask betrays nothing; she takes the rifle, and she passes her arm through the strap, resting it on her shoulder. In unison, they turn to face the backup team. Winter Soldier says, "Let's go."

~*~

She chooses the nest. Petras Galinis lives in a fairly new apartment block in a nice section of the city; there is a medieval cathedral half a mile away with a tower that has a perfect line of sight directly into his apartment. She sets herself up in her nest around midafternoon, adjusts her scope, and settles into a comfortable waiting position. Winter Soldier sits across the dusty room and watches her.

The children are small, and they play in the main room where they can benefit from the sunlight that shines in through the big window. Their mother passes through the room from time to time, brings them food and watches them play. She smiles at them in a way that makes something go funny inside Beta's chest. She wonders if it's a malfunction.

She wonders if she ever had a mother.

As the sun begins to sink in the sky, the mother turns the light on in the main room and Winter Soldier leaves the church to take up a waiting position inside the building. The mother gives the children their dinner. And then the door opens and Petras Galinis walks into the room.

The children scramble down from their seats at the table and run to him, clinging to his legs and talking up at him. Beta takes a deep breath, letting the world slow down around her. Winter Soldier has taught her how to listen to her heartbeat, how to take the shot between one beat and the next. She does this now, turning her focus inward, resting the crosshairs on Galinis's face. He bends down, hugging the children.

Beta takes a breath

Her heart beats

Galinis stands

She fires

His head explodes against the far wall of the room and the children begin to scream. The wife comes into view, also screaming, and drops to her knees beside her husband's corpse. Beta adjusts the rifle. She knows that Winter Soldier is already on the move. She takes a breath

Her heart beats

The apartment door opens and Galinis's wife looks up, raising her head

Beta fires

Winter Soldier steps into the room. Beta watches through the scope as he grabs the children, simply snatching them off the floor and walking past the corpses and out of the door with them. She disassembles her rifle in quick movements, stowing the pieces in various places inside her armor, and speeds her feet down the old stone staircase toward the ground level. Her heart is suddenly beating very fast, and her breath is coming short. She bursts out of the door on the side of the tower and snatches at her mask, falling to her knees in a nearby flower bed and vomiting.

When she raises her head, there is a little old man in a cassock standing over her. He says, "Are you all right, my dear?"

He has seen her. He will know her face. She is unusual enough that if any authorities ask him anything, he will remember her and he will tell them what he saw. She moves on autopilot; a moment later, he is lying on the grass with his throat cut. She snaps the mask back onto her face quickly, wiping the knife blade off on the priest's cassock before shoving it back into her boot. Then she vanishes into the darkness, making her way toward the rendezvous point.

She gets there before Winter Soldier, and she climbs into the waiting van with no hesitation. With nothing else to do but wait - she certainly isn't going to have a conversation with the backup team - she pulls out the knife she used on the priest and picks up a piece of rag that was left lying on a seat, and she focuses on cleaning every speck of blood off the knife. She is just finishing when the van's side door slides open. Winter Soldier shoves one of the children inside; she catches it with her free hand and drags it up onto the seat next to her, ignoring its tears. He pushes the second child in, and one of the backup team grabs it; then Winter Soldier climbs in, sliding the door shut behind him. "Go," he says simply, and the van goes.

~*~

The children are put into the hands of a man from Department X at a small base just outside of Vilnius who is delighted to see them, and who asks Handler if he can have a few hours to examine Beta. Handler checks the time and says no. "We're on a tight schedule, Doctor," he says.

"Oh, surely you can give me  _some_ time," the man cajoles. "I was instrumental in assisting with her early training, you know. You remember me, don't you, Asset Beta?"

Beta glances at Winter Soldier. He inclines his head very slightly, and she looks back at the man. "No," she says simply.

"The machine does its job so well," the man said, shaking his head with faux sadness. He looked back at Handler. "Just a bit of time?"

Handler sighs. "You can have an hour," he says. "No more. And she has to be functional when we leave."

"Of course she'll be functional," the man says smoothly. "I only want to get a look inside."

Handler nods. "Fine," he says.

"Come along, Beta," the man says, and he starts off down a hallway.

Beta turns to look at Winter Soldier again. He considers the man, then finally nods. He speaks in English. "Two, four, two. One hour."

She nods. She understands this directive; it is a self-protection protocol that was installed along with the rest of her programming. She is to obey this man she does not remember unless she feels that she is in danger of sustaining damage that might affect functionality; if that occurs, she is authorized to protect herself using appropriate levels of force. This man is not authorized to put her into the chair or under sedation. This protocol lasts for precisely one hour; at the end of that hour, this man is no longer authorized to give her any orders and she is to return to Winter Soldier immediately.

She turns away from Winter Soldier and follows the man down the hallway.

~*~

The lab is like any other, and Beta is very accustomed to labs. She spends a lot of time in them. She allows the Doctor's Technicians to draw blood and swab the inside of her mouth and look into her eyes and ears. They test her reflexes and her eyesight, and they ask her a lot of questions that she answers with either "Parameter undefined" or simply "I don't know."

She goes on alert when, at the half-hour mark, the Doctor tells her to take her clothes off. The order itself is not unusual; she spends a lot of time in labs with no clothes on. But Beta has been trained to read micro-expressions and body language, and there's something wrong with this request. This isn't an order to strip down for a full physical exam, which happens sometimes, or even a check for contraband, which happened once at the facility near Leningrad and resulted in a girl's execution.

This is... wrong.

It only takes Beta a split second to reach that conclusion. She slides off the exam table, but instead of stripping, she turns toward the door.

"Where do you think you're going?" the Doctor snaps. "Get back here."

"I am reporting back to my superior," Beta replies. "You do not have authorization for that level of examination."

"The hell I don't," the Doctor exclaims, clearly both surprised and incensed. "You're in my lab; you're required to follow my orders."

"False," Beta corrects him. "Under protocol 2-4-2 I am required to obey orders so long as they will not result in reduced functionality. Sustaining unwanted sexual contact has an eighty percent chance of reducing the functionality of this asset and is therefore not permitted under protocol 2-4-2. I will report back to my superior." She turns back toward the door.

He makes the mistake of trying to use physical force to stop her from leaving.

It is the last mistake he ever makes.

Beta meets the backup team halfway up the hallway; apparently they were alerted to trouble by the Technicians who ran screaming out of the lab. Winter Soldier is with them. "Report," he demands as soon as he sees her.

She snaps to attention. "Sir," she says. "This asset allowed physical examination as appropriate under protocol 2-4-2. The Doctor then attempted to order this asset to submit to unwanted sexual contact. When this asset attempted to return to its superior, it was prevented with physical force. When this asset responded with equal and appropriate force, the Doctor attempted to subdue the asset with a weapon. The asset neutralized the Doctor and was returning to its superior when you arrived."

The Winter Soldier's eyes have gone narrow and deadly. There is a long moment of silence. then Handler speaks. "You've got blood on your face."

Beta's eyes track to Handler's face. "That happens sometimes," she says simply.

Handler loads them back in the van and takes them across Vilnius to a different safe house. It's a ramshackle old farm house that's been abandoned for quite some time. From the outside, it looks like it's about to fall over; on the inside, it's an entirely different story. The place is nearly pristine, full of modern appliances and other conveniences. The upstairs bathroom has a shower stall wide enough for two, and Winter Soldier does not hesitate to join her under the spray of hot water.

They have been lovers for nearly six months now. There is nothing about his body that she doesn't know, and vice versa, but somehow it's still almost like the first time when he crowds her against the tile wall and lifts her up, bracing her with his hands under her thighs when he pushes inside her. She clutches at his shoulders, her short nails carving furrows in his skin, and they both grunt softly with each rhythmic thrust of their bodies, too aware of the men downstairs to lose themselves in each other as they sometimes can when they know they are alone and safe.

They bunk together in a small room at the end of the hallway, just the two of them spooned together on an inflatable mattress. Deep in the very dark hours when neither of them can hear anyone moving around in the house, Darcy murmurs in English, "I lied."

"About what, кукла?"

"When I said I didn't remember him. I did. I do." She swallows hard and forces the next words out. "He was involved in my initial training."

Winter Soldier goes very still behind her, his metal arm tensing around her waist. "What did he do to you?" he finally asks, his voice small and cold.

"He said I was getting too developed," she says softly, and gestures to her chest in illustration. "And that it was better for assets not to be... constrained by avoidable but unnecessary physical distractions." She pauses, swallowing hard. Emotions are weakness. But she has always been weak in that way. She clears her throat. "So they called me into Medical and they put me under. And when I woke up, I had about half as much breast as I did when I went in, and I stopped having periods."

She feels his hand curl into a fist against her lower abdomen. "Darcy," he murmurs against the back of her neck. He obviously wants to say more, but what else is there to say? What  _can_ he say? He can't swear that he'd have stopped them if only he hadn't been in stasis; they both know that would be a lie. He can't say that it doesn't matter, because it so obviously does. The idea that there would ever be a time when the two of them might leave this life and start a family would have been a pipe dream even if the option hadn't been taken away from them, but it would have been a  _nice_ pipe dream: something to cling to and whisper to each other on the dark nights when it was all too hard to bear, even together.

"I'm sorry," she says suddenly. She closes her eyes, turning her face and hiding it in her pillow.

He raises up on his elbow. "For what?" he asks. "This isn't your fault."

She shakes her head. "I feel like it is," she whispers. "I don't know why. I can't remember." She clutches at the neck of her tee shirt. "I can't remember how we met, Chefchen, but... I think maybe it  _is_ my fault. I think... I think I did something that caused this. But I can't remember what or how."

"It doesn't matter," he says firmly. He turns her onto her back, takes her chin in his metal hand. "Look at me, Darcy," he whispers. When she does, he repeats himself. "It doesn't matter. Okay? None of that matters." He pauses, leaning down to press a kiss to her cheekbone. "It's okay that you don't remember. I don't remember either. But I remember  _before_ we met. I remember what it was like being alone. And God forgive me, кукла, because I wouldn't have chosen this life for you for _ anything, _ but I'm glad I'm not alone any more." He strokes her hair back with his fingers. "I was this close to losing my mind, losing my humanity. And then you were there, and I had something to live for. Something that wasn't just waking up and killing and fueling and wiping and going back to sleep."

She wraps her arms around his shoulders, rolling them both onto their sides and holding him tight. He pulls her close, his arms around her back, and they lie there together for a long time, not speaking. When she finally does speak, she says, "I'm glad I'm here with you. And maybe that's... maybe that's fucked up and wrong and stupid, but... I'm glad. I just am."

He presses a soft kiss to the hinge of her jaw. "I know," he whispers into her ear. "And you're right. Maybe it is fucked up and wrong and stupid. But I'm glad you're here, too." He pauses, resting his temple against hers, and then he whispers, "I love you, кукла."

She pulls back to look into his eyes, and she gives him the best smile she can manage under the circumstances. "I love you, too, Chefchen," she whispers back. She kisses him, soft and slow, and he kisses her back, his metal hand sliding under the hem of her shirt. Warm from both their bodies, it doesn't even make her flinch when it slides up her side, cupping her breast.

He pulls back suddenly, grinning. "I gotta say, though, кукла. If this is only half of you, I'm not sure I coulda handled  _ all _ of you." He punctuates this statement with a soft bite to the underside of that rounded flesh, and she laughs, soft and low. "You're pretty goddamn perfect just like this," he adds, his lips brushing against her skin.

She reciprocates his attentions, pushing her hands down the front of his sweatpants to grip him firmly. "You're pretty goddamn perfect, too, you know," she replies. She leans up to kiss him again, and he rolls them off the mattress and onto the floor. It's colder and less comfortable, but it's better not to run the risk of having the damn thing explode underneath them.

In the morning, Handler loads them back onto the van and they are taken back to the airstrip where they landed. The plane taking them back to Germany is a different one, with a different pilot and a set of soldiers Beta has never seen before. Instead of sweatpants, this time they are both dressed in black canvas utility pants, black tee shirts, and black combat boots. Their tactical gear, including the masks and the goggles, stays behind in Lithuania, to be cleaned and stored at the original safe house in case they should be needed again in the future.

Beta's hair is tied back in a braid, the thick tail falling down between her shoulder blades, and she leans back against the wall of the transport beside Winter Soldier, her eyes half-lidded and her face as blank as stone. This time, she doesn't feel like everyone can see through her façade. This time, she knows what she is. There are four people who were breathing yesterday and who today lie cold and dead because she made them that way. In her mind, she thinks of their faces: Petras Galinis, Petras Galinis's wife, the priest at the cathedral, and the Doctor who took away a dream she didn't even know she could have.

Yesterday she was unfinished, a tool yet unforged. Today she knows who she is. Today she is a killer in the service of the Soviet state.

Heroes of the Revolution, defend us.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A warning here for graphic medical torture and a panic attack. You guys, this chapter is legit the darkest thing I've ever written, so please exercise caution if that kind of thing bothers you.

It turns out that Lukin is incredibly pleased with her performance on this mission -  _ including _ the dispatch of the Doctor. He does ask her to explain herself, but when she's done reporting exactly what happened in the lab, including her personal assessment of the Doctor's intentions and his attempt to physically subdue her, he actually congratulates her. "Clearly," he says, "the Doctor had some... undesirable characteristics that he was able to conceal from us. How he managed to do it for so long, I am sure I do not know." He shook his head, then said, "You have done us a service, my dear, in removing the adder from within our midst."

She doesn't quite know how to respond to this - not least because she suspects that it isn't really true. Not that Lukin isn't pleased that the Doctor is gone, but something tells her he knew exactly what kind of person the Doctor was. The surprise he exhibited when she reported her experience was feigned. No, Lukin is glad to be rid of the Doctor for some other reason - not that it is her business. So she merely nods her head once. "Sir."

Lukin sits down behind his desk and looks at her. "Before you left," he says, "I promised you that if you acquitted yourself well, you would earn an upgrade. According to the Winter Soldier's report, you not only met but far exceeded all expectations for you, and his evaluation is supported by your handler's report and by my own assessment of your report. You have more than earned your upgrade, and you have also earned a place as a fully-ranked asset in this program. As of today, you are officially being promoted to code name: Snow Maiden. Congratulations."

"Thank you, sir," she says, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice.

"My dear," he says, "it is a pleasure to me to see you so enthusiastic about your service to the state."

"Sir," she replies, the carefully crafted sentence falling easily from her lips, "I honestly cannot imagine my life in any other way."

He smiles then, broad and genuine. "It makes me very happy to hear you say this," he assures her. He pauses, clearly considering his next words, and then he says, "You know, I must say, I'm very glad that we have you here with us."

She blinks. "Thank you?"

"I mean that," he says. "Before you joined us, my dear, your soul mate was... well, let's just say he was a bit more difficult to work with. He's been so much happier since you came that it's almost like having a completely different person here. Sometimes I feel that I owe you a debt of gratitude."

"That's not necessary, sir, really," she replies, thinking fast and weighing her words carefully. "We are both happy to serve, and being able to do so together, as a team, is... even better."

She feels like the words are weak, like she hasn't expressed herself exactly right, but he seems to know what she means. "And my dear, I am perfectly content that you should remain together as a team, for as long as your service continues." He smiles again. "Go now, you're dismissed. Your upgrade procedure will occur tomorrow. For now, go and rest."

"Yes, sir." She salutes, turns, and goes.

Winter Soldier is waiting for her in the hallway, and there's something about the look on his face that makes her pause. "What?" she asks him.

He crowds her against the wall and murmurs into her ear. "If there wasn't a need to maintain discipline and decorum in public spaces, кукла, I would take you up against the wall right here, right now."

She feels her face flush bright red. "What the  _ hell. _ "

"Come on." He tugs her arm and pulls her down the hall, past the door to the room with the bunk beds. "We've been promoted," he says.

"Promoted?" She blinks at him. "Have you finally lost your mind? Is that what this is? You're having a psychotic break."

He rolls his eyes. "Just come on, кукла. I'll show you."

She lets him lead her down the hall and around a corner, and then he pushes open a door and guides her in ahead of him. She stops and blinks in surprise at the sight. "Is this...?"

"Married quarters," he confirms, kicking the door shut behind him. He wraps his arms around her shoulders. "I don't know what he had against that doctor, кукла, but you apparently did General Lukin a huge favor when you cut his fucking throat."

She stares at the room. "Wow," she whispers.

Intellectually, she knows that it isn't much; there is a sitting room furnished with a two-person couch and a bookshelf full of secondhand volumes of Russian, German, and Marxist literature. There is a tiny kitchen area with a small refrigerator, a sink, a hot plate, and a tiny, rickety table with two chairs. Through one door she can see a cramped bathroom: a toilet and a stand-up shower. Through the other door she can see the bedroom, with its double bed and single standing lamp.

She moves forward, almost in a daze; sitting on the kitchen table is the foot locker she packed up before being put away in Leningrad. There is no lock on it, but that isn't surprising; locks weren't allowed. She flips it open and reaches in, pulling out the knives that lie on top. The clothing comes next; she sets it all aside to use for training gear. And then she reaches out and pulls out the thing lying at the bottom of the locker.

She holds up the set of tiny throwing knives and shows it to him. "Do you remember this?"

He looks at it, then shakes his head. "Should I?"

"Probably not," she replies. "You probably didn't think anything about it when you gave it to me." She looks up at him and grins. "You're not allowed to laugh at me."

He holds up both hands. "Promise."

"The first day you came and trained us, you gave Natalia a knife for being more intelligent than Yelena or me." She holds up a finger when he would protest. "No. She earned it. She  _ was _ more intelligent." She unrolls the packet of knives, pulling one out and balancing it on her fingers. "The day before they put you back into stasis, you gave me these. You told me to practice with them, and on the day that I could put every one of them into the center of the same target, you'd give me a set of my own to keep."

"Ah," he says, reaching out and taking the knife away from her, sliding it back into the packet. "And did you ever earn that set of your own?"

She grins up at him. "Not yet," she admits. "But I'm getting there."

He takes it from her hands. "You've got time to practice," he promises her. "For now, the General gave us the rest of the day off. Let's take advantage of that, hmm?"

He doesn't have to suggest it twice.

~*~

The next morning they both rise early and figure out a new morning routine that involves taking turns in the tiny bathroom and brushing their teeth at the 'kitchen' sink. Winter Soldier has duties to perform, mostly on the training grounds, and B-  _ Snow Maiden  _ is supposed to report for her upgrade. He doesn't look pleased about it; when she asks why, he glances down at his own left hand and says, "I don't know. I just..." He sighs. "I don't remember when they upgraded me," he finally admits, his voice low. "But I don't think it was pleasant."

Her mouth goes dry and she has to swallow a couple of times before she can speak again. "Well," she says finally, "maybe they'll knock me out. They did last time."

He doesn't respond to that. He doesn't know how to tell her that there's no anesthetic he knows of that works on him, and by extrapolation there probably isn't one that works on her, either. He cups her cheek instead, and pulls her in for a long, hard kiss. "I love you," he whispers into her mouth.

"I love you, too," she whispers back. They go their separate ways at the T-junction in the corridor.

~*~

She walks into the main lab to find it a buzzing hive of activity. There are two Doctors in white coats, several technicians in shirts and bow-ties, and a number of lesser assistants in jumpsuits all moving around, frantically setting everything up. She pauses in the doorway, her eyes seeking and finding the clock that gives the time as 8:30 a.m. "Am I early?" she asks.

One of the Doctors spins in place and sees her standing there. "Oh!" he exclaims. "You're here!" He looks at the clock as well. "Ah, no, not early, just perfect, we're only running a bit behind, that's all. Come, come, sit, sit." He gestures her to the exam table in the middle of the room and she goes, hoisting herself up and sitting cross-legged, watching the activity. This Doctor is not one she's worked with before, and he seems nervous, fluttering around her. He comes at her with an ophthalmoscope, and she sits quietly while he looks into her eyes, examining them carefully. "Do you, er, do you have any trouble with your vision?" he asks.

"No, Doctor," she replies. She cants her head slightly, looking at him. "You don't have to be afraid of me," she says. "I'm not going to bite you, Doctor."

He blinks at her. "Of course not." He sets the scope down on a nearby table. "Excuse me for a moment." He walks over to the other doctor and there is a hurried, whispered conversation that she, thanks to the enhancements she's already received, can hear perfectly well.

_"Is it supposed to have a personality? I'd swear it just made a joke at me, but I thought it was supposed to be blank."_

The second Doctor, a man called Tsukanov who Snow Maiden has worked with before, glances over at her and then back at the first.  _"General Lukin finds that the assets are more effective when they have a little more... freedom of movement, shall we say?"_

The first Doctor shudders a little bit.  _"That's creepy,"_ he mutters.  _"I don't like it thinking it's a person."_

_"It IS a person right now, Garber,"_ Doctor Tsukanov snaps.  _"So treat it like one, unless you want this promotion rescinded."_

The first Doctor, Garber, goes pale and steps quickly away from the second. He bustles around the room for a moment, then returns to Snow Maiden with the look of a man steeling himself for unpleasant business. He has a blood pressure cuff in his hands, so she pulls the sleeve of her tee shirt up to her shoulder and holds her right arm out, allowing him to slip the cuff on. As he squeezes the bulb, she says, "So, Doctor, we've not met before. I'm called Снегу́рка in Russian but I think in German you say _Schneekind_ , is that right?" She smiles brightly at him.

" _Ja,_ " he snaps, focusing on his task.

She waits for him to finish checking her blood pressure and then she continues, "It's different in German, though, isn't it? The story, I mean. In Russian it's a girl made of snow who's sent to a childless couple by the Frost Lord, but in German it's a real boy, isn't it?"

" _Ja,_ " he snaps again, grabbing a tongue depressor and having a look down her throat.

When he is done, she leans forward just a little bit, and when she speaks, it is in a conspiratorial tone. "I'm not actually made of snow, you know," she says. "Snegurka is just what they call me. But I'm not a real girl, either. Maybe someday I will be, though, like Pinocchio. Wouldn't that be lovely?"

"Snegurka!" The sound of Tsukanov's voice makes her jerk her head around, but he is smirking at her when he speaks. "Leave him be, Snegurka," the Doctor tells her. "I need him focused, not trembling with suppressed rage."

Snegurka grins. "Yes, Doctor Tsukanov." She is silent for the rest of the examination, though she can't really stop the small smile that keeps playing around the corners of her lips.

Doctor Garber finishes the examination and walks away, leaving her to the Technicians. The head Technician is a Kazakh named Aronov, and he has worked with Snegurka before. He gives her a smile as he taps a vein in the back of her left hand for the IV needle. "Snegurka, huh?" he says. "Weren't you called Beta, the last time you were in here?"

"I was," she confirms, nodding. "I've been promoted to a full code name instead of an asset designation, since I did so well on my first mission."

"Well, congratulations," he says, taping down the cannula. "Shirt off."

She pulls her shirt off, careful of her hand, and gives it to him. He sets it aside, and attaches her to a saline drip. Then he takes out a packet of electrode stickers and begins attaching them, two on her forehead and two on her chest. These are attached to wires that lead into monitors, but the monitors are not yet turned on.

Aronov retrieves a pillow and has her lie back, then raises the table and angles it just a bit so that her feet are slightly higher than her head. He drags a bright surgical lamp near and positions it over her head, and then he reaches over and turns the monitors on. Her heartbeat begins to beep throughout the room; he turns the volume down. "Just relax," he tells her.

She smiles. "I'm relaxed," she assures him.

He pats her shoulder. "Okay, so this is going to be a little different from the last time you had surgery," he tells her. "We've been working with your blood samples and the Winter Soldier's, but we haven't yet been able to develop an anesthetic strong enough to knock you out, so unfortunately you're going to be conscious during the procedure. However, I don't expect you to actually  _feel_ anything. Okay?"

She nods. "Understood."

Doctor Tsukanov says, "It's time."

"Okay," Aronov says. "I'm going to activate the restraints, because we can't have you moving. You'll need to stay absolutely still during the procedure. Do you understand?"

"Understood."

She feels the restraints close around her ankles, knees, and hips. Her arms come next, Aronov doing the left and another Technician she doesn't know doing the right. Aronov brings up another restraint that clamps around her head like the chair's armature, with a little extra padded bit that goes across her forehead. He strokes her hair back gently before clamping it down. "You're going to be okay, Snegurka," he whispers.

She takes a deep breath in through her nose, but does not respond. She takes another deep breath, in and out, and focuses on the sound of her own heartbeat. Aronov switches out the saline bag for one full of a yellowish fluid; within just a few minutes, she feels herself relax, and the world seems to grow slightly removed.

The surgical light is turned on, and she squints reflexively. Doctor Tsukanov appears on her right side and Doctor Garber on her left. Both of them are now gowned for surgery, with gloves and masks and paper caps covering their hair.

"All right, Snegurka," she hears Tsukanov say. "We're going to begin the upgrade procedure now. I need you to hold very still and don't fight the restraints, no matter what happens. Do you understand?"

Very slowly, she responds. "Active orders: maintain stillness. Do not struggle."

"Good girl," Tsukanov says. A moment later, something touches her bottom lip. Of habit, she opens her mouth, and a familiar bite guard slips between her teeth.

Tsukanov reaches out and puts his fingers on her face, above and below her right eye. Garber begins attaching some kind of apparatus to her face that pulls the eyelids back, and Snegurka begins to understand what is about to happen. She focuses on taking very deep breaths and allowing the anesthetic to float her a little bit farther away from the world.

There are no words to describe the sensation of having her eye removed intact, and she hopes to God she never has to describe it to anyone. In fact, she almost hopes that they'll put her in the chair afterward and wipe this memory; this isn't something she thinks she is ever going to want to think about again.

When they actually disconnect her eye, everything goes very strange. Her perspective goes short and the texture of the ceiling turns strange and flat. Doctor Tsukanov disappears from sight; she knows he's still there, but she cannot see him. Her breath starts to come short, and the beeping of the heart monitor increases in tempo. Doctor Garber snarls something that her brain does not interpret, because she doesn't speak German, and she doesn't know where she is, where is her mother, where is her father, she can't breathe, she can't move -

She whimpers around the thing in her mouth, why is there something in her mouth, what are they doing to her, why won't they stop

And then there is a man standing over her head, leaning down, whispering in her ear, and it's a voice she recognizes, she knows it, and there are hands on her shoulders, giving gentle, rhythmic squeezes. Her breath catches, and her lungs settle into the rhythm of the squeezes, and with a feeling almost like a snap inside her brain, the words came back into focus.

"...breathe with me, in, one, two, three, out, one, two, three, four, come on, Snegurochka, breathe, now..."

She can't find the rhythm at first, so she simply stops breathing, holding her breath until the next time Aronov says  _in_ , and she draws in on his command, one, two, three, and then out on his command, one, two, three, four. They repeat this pattern again and again, until Aronov says, "There, that's good, Snegurockha. Are you all right now? Tap the table with your hand. Twice for yes, once for no."

She taps the table twice, continuing to focus on her breathing.

"Good girl," Aronov says, his hands continuing to squeeze her shoulders. "Do you remember where you are?"

She taps the table twice again, matching her breaths to the rhythmic squeezes.

"Good girl," he says again, his voice low and soothing. "Everything's okay; it's just a temporary alteration in your vision. You're being upgraded. Doctor Tsukanov is working on installing the hardware now, and it's going to be so much better. Just a few more minutes. Okay?"

She taps the table twice more.

"Good," he says again. "Very good. Just listen to my voice and this will all be over soon, all right? Here, I will tell you a story that I know from my childhood. Once there was a man whose name was Zhirenshe, and he was a bard, and he had a wife whose name was Karashash. And they lived very long ago in the time of the Khans, and the Khan was a very greedy and cruel man, but also foolish, and Zhirenshe and his wife were very wise..."

He goes on telling her stories of Zhirenshe and Karashash and how they outwitted their greedy and cruel Khan in various different ways, and she focuses on his voice's lyrical rhythm and his touch on her shoulders even as she  _feels_ the installation of hardware inside her right eye socket. She tries to ignore whatever Doctor Tsukanov is doing – it's very, very hard – and focus instead on the stories Aronov is telling. At some point, someone puts something squashy into one of her hands; she squeezes it rhythmically along with her inhalations and releases along with her exhalations.

There is no pain, exactly; there is a lot of pressure, though, and a strange feeling of  _invasion_ as various things happen inside her head. Finally, though, Doctor Tsukanov's voice cuts through the fog of Aronov's soft storytelling. "I am inserting the new eye now, Snegurka," he says. "You'll feel pressure and possibly a bit of a snap. Do you understand?"

She taps the table twice with her empty hand.

"Good girl," Aronov croons into her ear. "You're doing very well."

There is pressure then, on the edge of pain, and the promised  _snap_ that reverberates through her skull and makes her whimper around the bite guard. Aronov gives her shoulders a particularly firm squeeze, and she breathes deeply. Then Doctor Garber says, "I am activating the ocular device now."

Her brain is instantly flooded with information. She sucks in a breath, struggling to assimilate everything she is seeing. There are wild fluctuations in color, things that look like textual readouts, something that looks like a targeting array, and other things she can't even begin to process or assimilate, and it's all in her head at the same time. She wants to close her eyes against it all, but the apparatus holding her lids open is still attached to her face. Her mind whirls, struggling against it.

"Here, Snegurochka, I will tell you about the time when Zhirenshe the bard had a new donkey, and the Khan wanted to take it away." Aronov's soft voice slides into her ear again, grounding her while Doctor Tsukanov steps away from her side, letting one of the other Technicians step in to clean her face with cold wipes. The apparatus is gently removed, and Snegurka squeezes her eyes closed immediately, relishing the blessed, blank darkness that follows.

"They are taking away the medication now," Aronov murmurs. "It will wear off in just a few minutes, and then, when you are clear-headed, we will be able to calibrate your eye and you can go to your quarters and sleep for a bit. That's good, hmm?"

She whimpers softly in reply, squeezing the thing in her hand and breathing. Soon enough, she feels the distant feeling that the drugs had given her wearing off, and a dull, throbbing pain begins in her eye socket. Her heartbeat speeds up just a bit when the pain begins, and she hears Doctor Garber say, "Sit her up."

Aronov helps her to sit, turning her to the side so that her legs hang off the edge of the table, and he holds her steady until her breathing calms. She notes with an absent sort of detachment that she is shaking very badly. Someone tugs at the bite guard in her mouth and she releases it; someone begins peeling the electrodes off her, and someone else wipes at her chin with a towel. Aronov's voice is still crooning in her ear, helping to keep her calm.

Doctor Tsukanov speaks, and his voice is low and gentle. "All right, Snegurka," he says. "I need you to open your eyes." She does, and finds that three things have happened: everyone except Aronov and Doctors Tsukanov and Garber have left the room, the lights have all been lowered, and something is covering her right eye. "I'm going to move the blinder," he says. "Tell me what you see."

He moves the blinder and she tries to focus on his face. "I can't explain it," she admits. "There is too much. I see words and colors and targets and I can't make sense of any of it."

"The device is fully activated," Doctor Garber says. "The settings change with pressure." He takes her right hand in his and lifts it to her eye, showing her how to apply quick pressure to change the settings. "It is like a switch," he explains, and she understands.

She presses the eye. "Here I see colors," she says. She presses it again and describes a targeting apparatus. She presses it again and describes a text readout.

"Keep cycling until you reach normal vision," Doctor Tsukanov directs. As she obeys, he continues, "You will remain on normal vision until full healing is reached. Then we will begin training you on how to use this wonderful new upgrade. All right?"

"Yes, sir," she says.

"Good girl," Doctor Tsukanov praises her. "You did very well, and we're all quite proud of you."

"Thank you, sir," she manages. She wonders if she is going to throw up.

"Can you stand?" Aronov asks her.

She considers the question. "I don't know," she admits.

"Come, let's try." He helps her slide off the table and onto her feet. Once she's there, he steadies her, and when she's standing on her own, he retrieves her shirt. He helps her pull it on and makes sure it's straight. Then he says, "Snegurochka, I know that you are not feeling well right now. Do you need help to get back to your quarters?"

"No, sir," she manages. "I can make it."

"Are you sure?"

No. No, she isn't sure at all. "Yes, sir," she manages, swallowing hard to hold back the bile in her throat. "Am I dismissed, sir?"

Aronov glances over at the two doctors. They both nod, and he rubs her shoulders one last time. "You're dismissed, Snegurochka," he tells her. "Go home and rest."

"Thank you, sir," she says. She focuses her gaze on the door and her willpower on her legs, and somehow she makes her way out of the lab and into the hallway.

The light dazzles her at first, stabbing into her brain through the new prosthetic, and she bites back a cry of pain, narrowing her focus to the end of the hallway. All she has to do, she tells herself, is make it there. She manages it, and collapses against the wall there for a moment, breathing deeply. She finds her focus again: the next junction where she has to turn. She makes her way toward it, pausing occasionally to lean against the wall, utterly unaware that Aronov is following her from a safe distance.

She turns, makes her way up a hallway, and turns again – and there is her door. She can see it. She focuses every ounce of will that she has on it, staggering forward with one hand clapped over her mouth – and she looks up in shock when strong arms suddenly wrap around her torso, taking her weight and lifting her nearly off the floor. It is Winter Soldier, and he looks both murderous and terrified. He gets her through the door and over to the sink, holding her up against the counter as she throws up water and bile, gagging and coughing until there simply isn't anything to gag up any more, and then dry heaving until her muscles simply give out.

She collapses in his arms, and he lifts her up, carrying her into the bedroom and laying her gently down. " _Fuck,_ Darcy," he whispers as he brings a wet towel to wipe at her clammy face. "What the hell did they  _do_ to you?"

She opens her eyes and shows him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you need something to counteract the dark, I'd like to recommend ["You Know How I Feel, aka, The Adventures of Bucky and Muffy the Dinosaur"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1778113) by ifeelbetter. Hopefully, it will make _you_ feel better.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have I mentioned I love you guys? A lot.

The sight of herself with the prosthetic eye is a bit of a shock. It isn't terribly noticeable from a distance, because it's colored almost exactly like her natural eye. The difference is up close, where the blue iris of the prosthetic eye is clearly made of a multifaceted glass-like substance, and the pupil reflects light strangely because of the lenses behind it.

Winter Soldier promises that he doesn't care; he swears that he barely notices, and that even if he did notice, he wouldn't mind. She manages to convince herself to believe him after the first couple of days.

She gets a week to heal and then is summoned back to the lab for testing. At first, things are very bad, because the prosthetic doesn't match her natural eyesight perfectly. Having to adjust all of her rifle scopes is nothing compared to having to re-learn how to fire a handgun and throw a knife. She spends hours upon hours on the shooting range, firing round after round and struggling to reconcile her eyesight with her muscle memory. Eventually she catches the trick of it, and her range scores skyrocket once again.

Then she has to learn how to use the different settings. There is a setting that she can use to get infrared heat readings. There is a night vision setting. There is a setting that uses X-rays so that she can see into a package or a box or a vault. (She has a lot of fun looking at people's skeletons with that one.) There is a setting that can be used to communicate textually with a handler placed within a half-mile radius of her location. There is even a setting that will eventually allow her to access the base's computer system to pull information about targets - as soon as the Technicians work out a way for her implant to wirelessly connect to the computers, which they assure both Tsukanov and Lukin is just around the corner. One Technician brashly suggests that there may be a way to upgrade the implant in the future for weapons capability - he actually uses the word  _lasers_ \- but Snegurka quietly tells General Lukin that she is highly uncomfortable with the idea of having a laser inside of her head, especially given their tendency to overheat and explode, and General Lukin graciously agrees to forego that particular enhancement.

While she is re-training, Winter Soldier goes on two missions without her. When he comes back, he tests her on every skill she has ever learned, and she passes with flying colors. The implant does not give her headaches - which was Doctor Tsukanov's primary concern - and once she got the hang of how it changed her vision, it has improved her effectiveness. Almost a year to the day after Winter Soldier assessed her as  _adequate,_ General Lukin comes to the firing range to observe her progress and asks Winter Soldier about her skills. He pronounces her superior in everything. "If you will forgive my presumption, General," he says quietly, "she is absolutely everything that I thought she could be last year. I could not ask for a better or more effective partner for this work, sir."

"Excellent," the General says. "Truly excellent." He studies them both for a long moment, as though weighing something that he wants to say, but eventually he does not say it. Instead, he nods at them in farewell. They both salute, and he turns and leaves.

The next morning, Technician Aronov comes to their door and fetches them to the labs. It's unexpected but not unprecedented, so neither of them thinks a thing of it until they realize that it isn't the medical lab they're going to.

They stand in front of the chair, their hands clasped. Snegurka looks up at Aronov. "Have we done something wrong?" she asks softly.

"No, Snegurka," he assures her. "It is only that there is no immediate need for your skills. The world is at peace for now. So we will give you the rest you have earned until you are needed again. This is not a punishment. It is only sleep."

She nods, swallowing hard. "And when we wake?" she asks.

"You will be together again," Aronov assures her. "General Lukin has promised that this will be so. After all, do you not make the most effective team that the Soviet State could ever want?"

She nods, still staring at the chair and fighting back the tears that want to fall. Finally she takes a deep breath. "All right," she says.

"Come now, Snegurka," Aronov says, patting the chair. "Come and sit down."

She takes a step forward, and is stopped by Winter Soldier's grip on her hand. She turns to look at him, her eyebrow raising in question. Wordlessly, he pulls her back to him. He cups her face in his hands and leans down, kissing her hard and hot and deep, thoroughly owning her mouth and, for just a moment, washing away everything in the world except for him. When he releases her, he still doesn't speak, merely rests his forehead against hers, staring into her eyes.

She stares back, willing him to understand everything she dares not say in front of anyone else. Then she closes her eyes and presses her lips to his one last time.

When he releases her, his eyes are bright and wet. She gives him a gentle, wavering smile. And then she turns, walks over, and seats herself in the chair. Aronov offers her the bite guard and she takes it, settling back and relaxing into the chair as the restraints clamp down around her arms. The armature above her head begins to whirl, and she locks her eyes onto Winter Soldier's, baring her teeth around the bite guard as well as she can. He bares his own in return. And then the plates clamp down around her head.

Fire explodes inside her brain. She chokes on a gasp, her jaw clenching around the guard in her mouth, and then she screams and screams and screams.

When it stops, she sags in her bonds, sinking for just a moment into the blessed relief of the  _ absence _ of pain in her head. Someone takes the guard out of her mouth and she pants freely as the armature above her head whirs away. Someone steps up and peers into her eyes, and says, "Reset."

She feels information slotting itself into her brain. The man in front of her is Technician. The other man is Winter Soldier. Technician says, "What is your name?"

She replies, "Code name: Snow Maiden."

"What is your function?"

She searches her memory. "Function: Soldier for the Soviet State."

"Who is your soul mate?"

She searches her memory. "Code name: Winter Soldier."

"What are your orders?"

She searches her memory. "Active orders: undefined. Standing orders: Obey General Lukin. Obey Technician. Obey Doctor. Obey Winter Soldier."

"Good," Technician says. "Come along."

Winter Soldier has to help her out of the chair, because her legs will not cooperate with her orders. He helps her get her feet underneath her, and then he helps her across the room to the place where stand two metal capsules with glass windows in them. They are both empty. Technician goes over and opens one of them. Winter Soldier guides her to stand inside the capsule. Technician says, "You have done very well, Snow Maiden. We're very pleased with you. Rest now."

"Thank you, sir," she says.

Winter Soldier reaches up and strokes her cheek with the backs of his fingers. "Sleep now, кукла. We'll be together again soon."

"Goodbye, Chefchen," she whispers.

Winter Soldier steps back, and Technician closes the door of the capsule; she hears the latch lock on the outside. There is a moment of nothing, and then a moment of cold so intense that it literally steals her breath. Her eyes close reflexively against the ice.

~*~

**September 1983**

**Istanbul, Turkey**

Snegurka wakes up before she opens her eyes. She is cold, cold deep into her bones, and she hates the cold so much. Even as her body shudders repeatedly, she listens for what intelligence she can gather. She knows that she is lying on a firm but giving surface, likely a mattress. She knows that she is not alone; someone else is sharing the mattress with her. From the sound of his breathing and the shape that he presses into the mattress beside her, she knows that it is Winter Soldier.

Lukin kept his word.

She listens carefully. There is no other sound of breathing; there is no one else in the room. She manages to control her shivering body long enough to roll over and curl into his side. He is warm to the touch, though he shivers from inside just as she does.

Her voice wobbles when she tries to speak. "Ch- Ch- Ch- Chefch- chen," she finally manages. "Are you awake yet?"

There is a rumble from his direction; no speech, yet, but he shudders hard and rolls to face her. His eyes are open. She tries to smile. "Good morning," she whispers.

He rumbles at her again, clearly not yet up to speaking. He reaches for her, a halting movement that she responds to immediately, scooting herself closer to him and letting him tug her the rest of the way in and rest his chin on top of her head. It helps, to be so close together. It helps to make the cold go away.

A door opens. Snegurka raises her head just enough to see a man in a button-up shirt and a bow tie enter the room. He speaks a code word in a language Snegurka doesn't remember speaking. It identifies him as Technician. "S-S-Sir," she manages, an especially hard shiver wracking her body. "Code name: S-Snow Maiden active, sir."

"Winter Soldier?" the man inquires.

Winter Soldier rumbles again. Snegurka says, "Not just yet, sir. His speech hasn't returned."

"Do you need anything to speed your recovery?" the man inquires.

"C-C-Could we h-have a bl- bl- blanket?" she manages, several hard shudders curling her up into a ball.

The man obliges, covering them both with a heavy woven blanket that immediately traps their warmth. Snegurka can feel an improvement almost immediately. The man says, "I'll send a boy up with some tea, as well."

"Th-Thank you, s-sir," Snegurka manages. "W-We'll report as s-soon as we're able."

"Good enough," the man replies. He turns and leaves the room.

Snegurka lifts her hands, pressing them to Winter Soldier's abdominal core and rubbing gently. "Getting any b-better?"

He rumbles again, and then coughs. "Little," he manages. "F-fucking c-c-cold."

"Hate it," she agrees, continuing to rub at his abdomen and torso, feeling the warmth radiate from him. "Y-you're getting there."

He nods. Then he lurches forward and captures her lips with his. "M-missed you, кукла," he whispers against her skin.

She smiles. "Missed you, too, Chefchen."

They lie there in silence, letting the warmth seep into them. The door opens up a bit later to admit a small boy with a tea service; by that time, Snegurka is able to sit up with her back against the headboard. The boy pours her a cup of strong Turkish tea and turns to face her, holding up a cube of sugar with a questioning expression. She nods, and he drops it into the little cup, stirs, and then takes a quick sip of it himself before bringing it to her and offering it with a murmured "Hanfendi."

She takes it from him and says, "There's no need to test our food or drink for poison, child. I'm pretty sure there aren't any that can kill us."

The boy's eyes go wide, though she isn't sure whether the reaction is to the sentiment or the fact that it was expressed in what Snegurka is now fairly certain was Turkish. She briefly wonders when the hell she was implanted with Turkish. Then she pushes the thought aside in favor of taking a sip of the hot tea herself before turning to Winter Soldier, who is slowly pushing himself up onto his metal arm. "Here, love," she murmurs in English, lifting the little cup to his lips. "Drink a bit."

He gives her a look over the rim of the cup that clearly says he doesn't want to be coddled, but he does drink the tea, so Snegurka considers that a win and chalks it up. She can almost see the soothing warmth of it sliding down into his belly, and he shivers once more, hard, before pushing himself up to sit beside her. "God, I hate the fucking cold," he manages.

"Preaching, choir," she replies. "Seriously."

Winter Soldier takes the cup of tea from her hand, and the little boy quickly brings her a replacement. She gives him a smile, which he tentatively returns. She sips at the tea, letting her head loll against his human shoulder. Winter Soldier looks up at the boy and asks his name.

"I am called Mehmet, Beyfendi," the boy replies, appending the Turkish honorific in place of Winter Soldier's name, which he obviously does not know. He shifts from foot to foot, and then adds, "My mother serves the master of the house. Her name is Fatimah."

"Mmm," Snegurka hums. "And who is the master of the house?"

"Ah, Mama says to call him Karpov bey," the boy replies. "I heard the soldiers say his given name is Vasily."

"Vasily Karpov," Winter Soldier murmurs. "I know that name. I'm not sure why, though."

Snegurka attempts to access the informational connections in her implant, but there is no response. She sighs; they must need to be activated or something. Then she grimaces; she hopes they were adequately insulated against the electricity in the chair. Under the guise of rubbing her eye, she changes the settings; immediately she gets heat signature information from all around what is apparently quite a large house. Eye still working, then. That's good news.

She shakes her head. "I can't think of who he might be," she admits. "I suppose we'll find out when we report."

He nods. "Well," he says, "there's no sense lying about here for all the day, regardless of how good the tea is." He finishes his little cup and hands it to the boy. "Thank you, Mehmet."

The boy gives a little bow. "It is my pleasure, Beyfendi."

Snegurka does the same, and gets a little bow and another murmured "Hanfendi." Then both of them start to climb out of the bed. The boy takes the tea set and scarpers with it.

Snegurka takes the opportunity once the door is closed behind him to stretch hard, bending herself backward almost double. When she straightens, Winter Soldier is standing directly in front of her. He wastes no time wrapping his arms around her and devouring her mouth in a hot, wet kiss. When he releases her, he rests his forehead against hers and he grins, just a little bit. "Lukin kept his word," he whispers.

"Yep," she whispers back, grinning as well. "So, a new adventure?"

"A new adventure," he confirms. He kisses her again and then he releases her, turning to a nearby table where two neatly folded sets of clothes lie, obviously waiting for them. "Let's get this show on the road," he says, and tosses her clothes to her.

Half an hour later, dressed in better-made versions of their tactical gear ("What  _ is _ this stuff?" -- "I have no idea, but I bet it's bulletproof."), Winter Soldier and Snow Maiden open the door to the room they woke up in and step out into a tiled hallway. 

"Definitely Turkish," Winter Soldier murmurs softly as they took in their surroundings. The architecture is stereotypically Ottoman, featuring tiled floors, dome-like arches on the doors and windows, desert colors, and brilliant, intricate murals. He strides to the nearest window and peers out. "Istanbul, unless I miss my guess."

"Because that happens so often," Snegurka replies, smirking just a little bit.

He gives her a rusty chuckle. "Smartass." Then he looks around at a soft shuffling noise. Young Mehmet has appeared at the head of a set of stairs, and he is looking both anxious and relieved.

"Oh, Beyfendi, Hanfendi, you are about, this is good. Karpov bey wishes to see you." He gestures to the stairs.

"Well," Winter Soldier says in low English. "Let's not keep the boss waiting." He moves off toward the stairs, following Mehmet, and Snegurka follows him, a soft chortle escaping her throat.

~*~

Vasily Karpov is an old man, frail and stooped with age, but surrounded by the aura of former power. He is clearly accustomed to being larger, taller and stronger, but he wears his diminished capacity with dignity and grace. Technician Aronov, who met them in the main downstairs hallway and who looked vaguely familiar to Snegurka, explained before they came into Karpov's sitting room that the gentleman is a retired Soviet officer, a Major General of the Russian army, and that he was also instrumental in setting up the Winter Soldier program through Department X - "the project that made both of you," he added unnecessarily.

Winter Soldier and Snow Maiden now stand side by side at parade rest, watching General Karpov stare into the fireplace and sip at his tea. When he finally chooses to speak, he says, "General Lukin has sent you to me. There is work for you both, here in the Middle East." He looks up at them. "Your primary function will be to serve as my bodyguards, but there will be other missions. One or both of you may, at times, be sent elsewhere to serve the purposes of the State. But those missions are secondary, and you will take them when I say, and only when I say. Do you understand?"

"Understood, sir," they reply in unison.

He studies them. And then he says, "You are different now, Winter Soldier."

"Sir?" Winter Soldier inquires.

Karpov sips at his tea. "When you were first... conceived," he explains, a slight, sardonic smile gracing his lean features, "you were not so compliant. You struggled against your destiny. For a long time, we were forced to keep you on a very short tether. It is very likely that you do not remember those days; I do." He shakes his head slightly. "When Lukin told me about acquiring your little Snow Maiden, and that he intended to see what affect her presence would have upon you, I admit that I thought it was a foolish risk. But you are good for him, Snegurochka. You... civilize him."

She cuts her eyes toward Winter Soldier, wondering how best to react to this very odd observation, but his blank face doesn't give her any clues, so she simply inclines her head in silent acknowledgement that her superior has spoken and she has heard.

Karpov smiles again. "These are merely the rambling observations of an old man," he confesses. "Here is my intent. You had an... understanding, shall we say? With General Lukin. You were permitted nearly total freedom in your minds, in your movements, and in each other in return for your unswerving loyalty to him and to the State and your unquestioning obedience when given orders. Would you say that this is correct?"

"Yes, sir," Snegurka says softly. In her periphery, she sees Winter Soldier look at her strangely, and she realizes that he must have never actually had it out in words with Lukin the way she did. Well, they'll discuss it later.

In the meantime, Karpov has nodded firmly. "I see no reason to change that," he says simply. "So let us be very clear on expectations. I expect that, as I stated, you will serve primarily as my security team. You will not be alone in this; I have hired personnel. But you, Winter Soldier, will be in charge of their movements and their training and their orders. Yes?"

"Yes, sir," Winter Soldier replies.

"Very good. And for you, Snow Maiden, there is more. You will assist the Winter Soldier as needed; when he is not in need of you, you will work with Aronov and the other technicians. Computing technology has vastly improved since the two of you were last awake, and Aronov believes he can unlock some of the better capabilities of your implant."

Snegurka nods once. "Yes, sir."

Karpov taps his chin with his finger, clearly thinking hard. For a long moment he is silent; then he speaks again. "You will, of course, reside here. An apartment has been prepared for you." He studies them carefully, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them. "Perhaps a small stipend would not go amiss. After all, I shouldn't wish to deprive two lovely young people of the opportunity to outfit their newlywed flat in whatever way they see fit." He smiles, and there is something almost mocking behind it.

Snegurka doesn't care. A stipend.  _ Money. _ "That's... that's very generous of you, sir," she manages.

Winter Soldier murmurs his thanks as well, clearly having at least some of the same thoughts that she is having. Karpov waves off their thanks and dismisses them from his study. Little Mehmet is in the hallway outside, playing some complicated game that involves stepping only on the blue floor tiles; he looks up when they come out and says, "Aronov bey says I should show you to your apartment now. Do you want to see it? It's very nice."

"Yes, Mehmet," Snegurka replies. "That would be very nice."

They follow him through the house, which is built on a slope. From the front, the house appears to contain only three floors; the actual bottom floor has been dug out of the hillside itself, and is given over to small servants' apartments. Neither Snegurka nor the Winter Soldier mind being thought of as servants - it's a step up from the blank robotic slates that their contacts sometimes expect them to be - and the apartments are actually quite nice. Theirs consists of a cozy sitting room, an eat-in kitchen with a full size refrigerator and stove, a full bath with a claw-footed tub that's been retrofitted with a shower attachment, a bedroom with a queen-sized bed, and a tiny second bedroom set up with a little cot, a night table, and a chest of drawers.

Winter Soldier raises an eyebrow at the second bedroom - it doesn't feel like a spare (and what would they do with one, anyway?) - it feels like a room that someone is going to be living in. "Whose room is this?" he asks Mehmet.

"Mine, Beyfendi," the boy says, puffing up his chest with pride. "Karpov bey has said that I am to serve you at all times, and so I am to sleep here."

Snegurka and the Winter Soldier exchange glances. That's... inconvenient. "Wouldn't you rather stay with your mother?" Snegurka coaxes.

"Oh, no, Hanfendi," the boy replies, beaming at her. "I am proud to serve you!"

"Well," Snegurka says, thinking fast, "what about lessons? School?"

The boy's face scrunches up. "I don't go to school," he says.

"You do now!" Winter Soldier says triumphantly. "We'll enroll you tomorrow."

The boy's face goes just slightly mulish, and Snegurka can't help but laugh. "Mehmet," she says, "we don't need anything else right now. Do you want to go and play with your friends?"

The obstinate look brightens. "Really?"

"Really," she says, nodding. "Go and play. Be back in time for supper."

"Yes, Hanfendi!" the boy exclaims. Needing no further encouragement, he darts out of the apartment, the door banging shut behind him.

Snegurka turns to face Winter Soldier. "Surprise, it's a boy?"

He bursts out laughing, reaching out to cup her face in his hands. "Come here, кукла," he says softly. She comes, and he leans down to capture her lips with his, wrapping his arms around her.

She holds him tightly in return. "I was afraid of waking up," she admits, breathing the words against his skin. "I was afraid you might not be there."

"Maybe one day we won't have to go to sleep again," he offers.

She laughs softly, a little bitter. "You mean maybe one day they won't need us around to kill for them? Maybe. And maybe one day it'll rain ice cream and penny candy."

"That would be both sticky  _ and _ painful," he observes.

"Yeah, well, that's what it'll be for us the day they don't need us any more," she says sourly. "So probably it's best if we continue to be valuable assets for the time being."

He sighs softly, his breath brushing across her ear. "Probably it's best if we don't worry about it," he says finally. "We can't do anything about it anyway. And you know as well as I do that if they tell us to go back to sleep, we'll go. We always do." He put a finger under her chin, tilting her face up to look at him. "So probably it's best, right now, if we spend a little time being grateful that we're here together, hmm?"

She smiles. "I like that idea." Her hands travel down his body, slow, sure, and suggestive. "I like it a lot, actually."

His hands relieve her of her uniform top. "Then we're agreed," he says, bending down to taste her skin.

"Very -  _ oh!  _ \- very much," she assures him. He starts maneuvering her toward the bedroom door, never lifting his mouth from her neck, and they spend the rest of the afternoon being extremely grateful for a lot of things.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which things happen and stuff.

**December 1983**

**Doha, Qatar**

One of the most convenient things about working in a Middle Eastern country, Snegurka thinks, is the way that nobody really seems to notice her when she's covered. One of the most convenient things about working in a fairly modern Middle Eastern country is the way that nobody seems to notice when she's covered  _ and _ unaccompanied by a male chaperon. 

Her target is here somewhere. She rubs at her eye, switching on her facial recognition search function, and she slowly scans the crowd as she sits beside a fountain in the center of town. The implant still has trouble separating action commands from random thoughts while it's working, so she sings children's nonsense rhymes very softly under her breath to keep her mind from wandering and interfering with the search.

The little blue square flashes over face after face after face until suddenly it goes red and zooms in. There he is, sitting outside a tea shop, puffing on a hookah. She smiles behind the veil of her niqab and she stands. Gathering up the woven hemp bags that carry her fresh food purchases, she makes her way through the throngs of shoppers, carefully pacing a pack of loud, fat American tourists.

As she draws abreast of the cafe and the target sitting outside the door, she raises her left hand underneath the concealing robes and fires into the gap between two pedestrians. The modified gun fires a single ricin pellet with little more than a soft  _ fwoop _ sound, and the Snow Maiden keeps walking, her eyes on the path in front of her, not even noticing when her target jumps, smacking at the sting like a scorpion's bite in his right calf.

She disappears into the maze of the city, making her way with unhurried steps toward the little safe house just a few streets away. Once inside, she removes the hemp bag that hangs from the false arm on her left side and sets it on the table. Then she removes the arm itself. She makes sure the door is locked and the window shaded, and then she shrugs the niqab off, shaking the lightweight fabric out and draping it over the back of the chair.

She lays the fake arm on the floor and stomps down on it hard with her boot; it breaks into several large pieces, and she gathers these up and carries them outside into the little brick courtyard. There is a metal drum in this courtyard that is half-full of trash and refuse; she tosses the arm pieces into it, then tips in a bit of kerosene out of her little lamp and follows it up with a lit match. She stands over the barrel until everything in it is reduced to ash, then goes back inside.

In the night, she folds up the niqab and tucks it into one of the hemp bags. She covers her head and face with a black hijab and steps out of the safe house, pulling the door shut and locking it behind herself. She carries the bags up the street to a place where young homeless children tend to congregate, and hands them out, then melts into the shadows and speeds herself through the city to her extraction point.

They are waiting when she arrives: three men in nondescript black, leaning against a silver van. "You're late," one of them grates.

"I'm not even close to being late," she replies. "There's supposed to be a motorbike for me."

"It's in the van," the same man grates. "There's an extra charge."

She raises an eyebrow. "Oh, is that a fact?"

"It is, Princess," the man says. "If you want your bike, it's going to cost you five thousand riyal. And a turn between those thighs for each of us."

The expression that crosses her face is less a smile and more a baring of teeth. "Well then," she says. "If that's the price." She shifts her stance just slightly. "Which one of you thinks he wants the first turn?"

Five minutes later, she breaks the lock off the back door of the van with her bare hand, swinging the door open and pulling out a blue 1975 Voskhod 3M by the back tire. She takes a moment to look through the rest of the van's contents and finds a thick, down-filled coat, a helmet, and a backpack full of supplies. She smirks, pulls on the coat, and then hoists the backpack onto her shoulders. She swings her leg over the bike and turns, looking over her shoulder at the three men who are lying in the dirt behind her. She thinks about leaving them with some kind of parting shot, but decides that it would be pointless since they are all unconscious anyway. She pulls the helmet on, jumps on the bike's kick-starter, and buzzes away toward the Saudi border. A helicopter picks her up there two days later, carries her across Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria, and drops her off in Antioch.

She finds a telephone booth and calls the communal telephone installed in the downstairs hallway. Mehmet answers. "Hallo, this is Mehmet!" he sings into the reciever.

"Hallo, Mehmet!" she sings back. "It is Snegurka."

"Hanfendi!" He exclaims. "It is good that you called! Beyfendi grows cantankerous in your absence."

She laughs. "Is he busy, Mehmet?"

"No, indeed, Hanfendi," he assures her. "Only he is in the yard shouting at one of the night guards. I'll go get him. Hold on!"

She listens to the plasticky  _ thunk _ as he sets the phone receiver down on the table, and then the  _ slap-slap-slap _ of his feet as he runs down the hallway to the door. She leans against the glass wall of the booth and hums softly to herself a snatch of melody that she heard from a street musician in Doha. Within half a minute, she hears the much heavier tread of boots on tile and she smiles.

He picks up the reciever. " _ Evet _ ."

She smirks. " _ Evet _ to you, too, Chefchen."

"Кукла," he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice. "He didn't say it was you, just that there was a call for me."

"He also said you were shouting at one of the night guards."

Winter Soldier growls low in his throat. "I caught him harassing one of the cleaning girls. I told him they're not his personal playthings, and if I hear about it again, I'll cut his balls off."

She hums. "Do you think he believed you?"

"Considering I had one hand around his cock and a knife in the other, yeah, I think so."

She laughs. "You are such a good communicator when you want to be."

He snorts softly. "So how was your trip?" he asks.

"Excellent," she replies easily. "I had a very good time. I'm glad it's almost over, though. I'm quite ready to be home again."

"And when do you anticipate that will be?"

"I expect I'll be in Ankara tomorrow," she replies. "So you can extrapolate from there."

He gives a low hum. "I can, indeed," he says. "I look forward to seeing you again."

She is interrupted by the voice of the operator demanding that she deposit more coins into the pay phone. "I'm out of time, Chefchen," she says. "I'll call when I reach Ankara."

"Do that," he replies.

She catches the next bus, and is in Ankara about ten hours later. It is quite late, and she weighs her options; she could catch the next train on to Istanbul and go on home, but if she does so, she will spend the next six or seven hours in the uncomfortable hyperaware state she sometimes falls into when she is overtired and not safe. Alternately, she could bite the bullet and take a small room for the night, sleep safe, and go on into Istanbul tomorrow.

And then she hears a sound that has her spinning in place with a huge smile on her face: Winter Soldier's distinctive, heavy tread on the tiled floor behind her. She allows herself the indulgence and squeals in excitement, dashing toward him and letting him catch her in his arms and spin her around.

"There you are!" he says softly into her ear. "God, I missed you."

"I missed you, too, Chefchen," she whispers back to him.

He kisses her hard, just once, and then puts her down. "Come on," he says. "I've already got a room for the night."

She lets him sling his arm around her shoulder and guide her up the street to a small travelers' hostel. He does indeed have a room: a very small one, but private, with a door that locks. She takes very quiet advantage of the communal bathing room to wash the filth of travel from her body, and pads back to their little room barefoot, dressed in denim shorts and a tee shirt.

When she gets there, he is sitting on the side of the narrow bed, also barefoot, contemplating a spot on the wall. After locking the door, she leans over and looks at the spot, then back at him, then back at the spot. "Good paint?" she asks.

He snorts, reaching out to grab her wrist and pull her to him. "Come here, кукла," he says softly. He tugs her into his lap and leans back against the wall, his hands resting on her hips. "I want to ask you something."

She tilts her head. "All right," she says, covering his hands with hers. "Ask me."

He swallows hard, looking down at their joined hands for a moment, then looks back up at her again. "Darcy," he says softly, "I want you to marry me."

She blinks at him. "Re- You do? Really?"

He nods. "Really," he says. "And I could sit here and list out all the reasons why, make it a whole huge grand romantic gesture or something, but you know why. I don't gotta tell you." He reaches up and cups her cheek with his right hand. "I wanna marry you. Proper. In a church in front of a priest and everything. So, what do you say? Will you?"

She leans down and kisses him, soft and warm and slow. "Yes," she says.

He reaches up and wraps his arms around her, pulling her in and holding her tightly. And then he rolls her over and they try very, very hard to be quiet.

There are no Christian churches in Ankara except for those located on embassy grounds, and these are off limits to them for obvious reasons. So, in the morning, they get onto Winter Soldier's bike and they drive back to Istanbul. Before returning to Karpov's house, they pass through the city and around the Golden Horn, to the Bulgarian St. Stephen Church. They both take a moment to admire the gorgeous construction of the cathedral - and the fact that the entire building is made of cast iron - and then they go inside.

It doesn't take long to find a priest; it takes a little bit longer to convince him to marry two people who aren't Bulgarian or Orthodox and won't even tell him their names, but everyone has a price, and his is lower than some. Winter Soldier folds a wad of cash into the priest's hand, "for the orphans or whatever," and the priest convinces a couple of French tourists to stand in as witnesses. They forego the traditional mass in favor of the vows and a simple blessing, but Winter Soldier's hands shake when he pulls a slim gold ring out of his pocket and slides it onto her finger, and Snegurka finds herself wiping away tears when she speaks her vows. And then the priest promises them that even if they don't have paperwork, they're married in the eyes of the church and whatever god might be paying attention to nameless Russian assassins that day, and they kiss each other in front of the altar like it's the first time.

~*~

**June 1985**

**Baghdad, Iraq**

Handler taps on the door before he comes into the room; everyone does now, since the first time someone came in quietly and tried to wake them up by shaking Snegurka's shoulder. (Fortunately the result only involved broken bones.) Winter Soldier rolls over and sits up; Snegurka stretches hard and sits up as well, one hand coming up automatically to hold the blanket against her bare chest. They have been in Baghdad for three weeks now, waiting for the time to strike; today, Handler pushes the door open and says "It's time."

Winter Soldier nods, throwing the blanket back and climbing out of bed. Handler steps out and closes the door again, and Snegurka gets up as well. "Nose to the grindstone?" she says.

Winter Soldier laughs softly. "Where'd you hear that?"

She shrugs. "I don't know. Maybe somebody said it to me one time." She retrieves her tactical gear from the shelf and begins to dress.

He runs a hand through his hair. "When we get back to Istanbul, will you cut this for me?" he asks. "I'm tired of it being in my eyes."

She blinks. "Sure," she says. "I don't know if I'll be any good at styling it, but I can make it shorter, anyway."

He shrugs, pushing his feet into his boots. "I don't care about style," he says.

"You should." She reaches out and grips his stubbly chin, turning his face this way and that, examining his features. "You're very handsome, you know."

He cocks an eyebrow at her. "I'm pretty much a sure thing, кукла," he says. "You ain't gotta butter me up."

She laughs, tiptoeing to kiss his lips quickly before pulling her shirt on. "It's true, though," she says. "I see women look at you sometimes." She grins slyly and adds, "Sometimes men, too, but they try to be more discreet."

He jerks back, staring at her like he was trying to work out whether she was joking or not. She raises an eyebrow at him as she stamps her feet into her boots. "Are you freaking about the looking, or about the men looking?"

"The looking," he says. "I don't want people noticing me."

She smiles slightly. "I got bad news for you then, Chefchen. People notice you when you aren't actively trying to hide. You're very striking." She reaches up and pats his cheek, then goes to the mirror and starts quickly braiding up her hair. "Stop worrying. You know how to disappear as well as anyone. It's only that people notice attractive individuals. They glance your way, and they appreciate how pretty you are, and they move on. It's not a thing, honey, don't make it one."

He recoils hard that time. "Did you just 'honey' me?"

She laughs. "That's a  _ no _ on honey?"

"Yeah, that's a big  _ hell no. _ "

She laughs, shaking her head, and snaps a hair tie on the end of her braid. "Sorry." She tiptoes and lays a smacking kiss on his cheek. "Come on, Chefchen," she says then. "Let's go take care of business."

As the sun goes down, Handler brings them to the center of the city. "Your target," he tells them, "will be in the center courtyard of the palace in thirty minutes."

"And we're sure this time?" Snegurka asks, just a touch of acid in her voice. This is, after all, the third time they've done this dance. "We're running out of new perches."

"If he's not there today," Handler says, "you're authorized for a non-lethal shot at the secondary target."

Winter Soldier's eyebrows lift slightly in surprise; Snegurka feels her own do the same. Even a non-lethal shot at Hussein would be a big deal, and necessitate a massive change in plans. "Do we have an extraction for that?" she demands.

Handler nods. "If you have to take option two, signal on the radio so that we can get into position, and rendezvous at the Baghdad Tower in three hours."

They both nod. Winter Soldier vanishes into the crowd between one breath and the next. Snegurka remains in place, eyeballing Handler for a long moment. She isn't a hundred percent sure that he's trying to double-cross them (if she was, he'd be dead). But she has a funny feeling about this mission. She wants him nervous. Once she's satisfied that he is, she adjusts the veil of her niqab to cover her nose and mouth, turns, and slips easily into a group of girls from the nearby university.

Once she is away from Handler, she slips a tiny earpiece into her ear and finds a quiet corner in an alleyway. "Chefchen?"

"Reading, кукла," he responds immediately. "In position."

"I'm making my way in," she advises him. "I should be in position in just a few minutes."

"Good. You know the signal."

"One if by land, two if by sea," she murmurs absently, making her way past the guards and into the Republican Palace.

"And I on the opposite shore will be," he replies. Her steps falter. There is a moment of awkward silence. And then he mutters, "Enough chatter."

"Yeah," she replies, slightly breathless. They are both silent until she whispers two more words: "In position." She seats herself on a bench in a shaded part of the palace courtyard and opens a book on Iraqi history. Settling in, she reads with her left eye while her right eye scans every face that passes her, the recently-upgraded implant's new facial recognition software working overtime. It is less than fifteen minutes before the blue targeting square goes red. "Target in play," she murmurs.

"Identify," he replies.

She turns the page in her book. "Northwest quadrant. Bald. Blue suit, yellow tie."

"Just laughed at something his companion said?"

"That's him." She turns the page again. "At your convenience."

"Thanks, кукла," he says dryly. A moment later, there is a distant crack like thunder. Barely a second after that, screams erupt around the courtyard as the head of the bald man in the blue suit explodes. People begin running everywhere, and Snegurka does the same, clutching at her book and screaming just like everyone else. She flees from the palace even as the Republican Guard are trying to lock the place down, getting two blocks away before snatching the brightly striped niqab off her head. Underneath it is a simpler blue hijab scarf. She stuffs the striped fabric into the first trash bin she comes to, double checks to make sure her hair isn't slipping out from underneath the blue hijab, and adjusts the black robe she wears over her tac suit. Once everything is in place and she's sure she doesn't look like she just went running out of the palace after helping to assassinate one of the President's highest advisors, she turns at a corner and begins making her way toward the rendezvous point.

~*~

**October 1987**

**Istanbul, Turkey**

He's been gone for a week, and she isn't sure where, only that he's back in Eastern Europe, on loan, doing something for President Ceaușescu. Neither one of them likes being left behind when the other goes on missions, but sometimes it's necessary. Sometimes two is better than one, but sometimes not, and this is one of those times.

Not that she's bored; in his absence, she is the head of household security. Also, Technician Aronov is losing his eyesight, and he is teaching her everything he knows about how to repair Winter Soldier's bionic arm when this is necessary. "You never know when the two of you might be in the field alone and you might need to do this," he explains. He starts her with basic lessons in cybernetic technology, and moves her quite rapidly through the basic concepts of mechanical engineering that she needs to know in order to understand how the arm functions.

One afternoon, he passes a packet of documents from his computer workstation to hers. She begins flipping through them absently, making note of which ones she needs to look at later and which ones she needs to save for reference, when she opens one and discovers a schematic of Winter Soldier's arm that she's never seen before. It's got a whole extra section detailed in the upper arm where other schematics had shown an empty space that housed the stump of his lost flesh arm.

This new schematic shows her that there is, in fact, no flesh arm left. Instead, the entire shoulder joint was replaced with a titanium/vibranium alloy, and the entire arm is prosthetic. And there are two trackers and a remote-triggered explosive in the bicep.

She flips away from the schematic quickly, dropping it into a new folder, and then raises her head slowly and turns to look at Aronov. He's looking back at her, his face blank and calm. He inclines his head barely an inch, and then he looks back down at his own workstation. Snegurka continues to look at documents for about fifteen more minutes while the document uploads, then shuts her computer down and stands up, stretching. "I'm going outside," she says. "I can't concentrate any more today."

Aronov nods. "Sometimes I feel the same way," he assures her.

She makes her way out into the courtyard and up onto the wall that goes around the house. From there, she uses a drainpipe to scramble her way up onto the flat roof. The sniper on duty gives her a nod when she comes over the edge, but otherwise does not speak. She crosses the roof and hops up onto the wall, seating herself on the edge and staring out over the Golden Horn.

With the newest version of her implant, the Technicians have finally allowed her to achieve mental control of her prosthetic. They figured out how to store files on it two upgrades ago. Now that she has the new software, she doesn't even have to touch her eye - which had become something of a tell - in order to access the information stored on the silicone chips embedded inside her skull.

She pulls up the new schematic. It overlays itself on top of her view of the Bosphorus, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that explosive device and those two trackers. The trackers are, of course, easy enough to deal with; open the arm, dig them out and crush them. The explosive, on the other hand, is far more problematic. She spends the next hour or so examining it carefully, learning how it is attached and the mechanisms that trigger it. Conveniently enough, the schematic also includes instructions on how to disable it in case the arm should need to be removed for repair. She commits this information to a hidden partition she built inside her implant.

She knows what they do, now. She understands the chair. She doesn't know how it works - nobody is going to give her access to _that_ kind of information - but she understands the concept that electricity can be used to reset the brain and either block access to or erase memories altogether. She understands about wiping. She understands why it is necessary; the original personality that inhabited her body was incompatible with the functions the State required it to fulfill, and had to be altered. She gets that, and she doesn't really resent it. (Much.) But knowledge is power, and just because they had a deal with Lukin, just because they have a deal with Karpov, it doesn't follow that every master they're ordered to serve will respect that deal or be interested in keeping it.

Better to protect herself, and to protect her soul mate.

He was in bad shape when she came to him. She knows this. He's told her what little he remembers of what he calls the dark time - before she came, when his mind nearly buckled under the strain of being alone in such a painful life. But he has her now, and it is her responsibility to make sure that he is never alone again. He would probably disagree; he would claim that it was his responsibility to take care of her. But he has no silicone chips inside his head, insulated from the electric current and designed especially to hold vital information between wipes. She does. By default, the job falls to her.

As the sun goes down, Snegurka tucks the schematic away where she's hidden all the other vital bits of information that she doesn't want to lose. It goes in with things like the sound of his voice saying her real name, the way he feels when he pins her to the mattress and presses his body between her legs, and the way he looked when they were married. She's already set herself up a careful little trail of breadcrumbs, so that even if she should be wiped, she will be able to find her way back to it.

She climbs down off the roof as the guards are changing, and heads into the downstairs kitchen to see what smells so good for dinner. It turns out to be lamb kebab and fried fresh aubergine, and she tucks in cheerfully, grinning as the old granny who does the cooking chides her about her enhanced appetite while piling more food onto her plate. She's nearly done eating when a warm figure straddles the bench seat beside her. Winter Soldier, sweaty and smelling of travel and gunpowder, leans forward and rests his head on her shoulder. "Hello,  кукла," he murmurs.

"Hello, Chefchen," she murmurs back. She offers him a bite of pita bread slathered with hummus. He takes it, stares at it without interest for about ten seconds, and then wolfs it down and reaches for another. She pushes her plate closer to him, and the kitchen granny scolds them both even as she stands up and ladles more food into the dish.

Snegurka grins at the little old crone. "Forgive him, Grandmother," she says in Turkish. "He was raised by wolves."

"That's accurate," he mumbles through a mouthful of kebab. "This is delicious, Grandmother," he adds a moment later, once his mouth is clear. "Thank you." She just hushes him and piles more food onto the plate.

Late that night, as they lie tangled together in their bed, she rests her head on his chest and listens to his heartbeat and wonders if she should tell him about the explosive embedded in his arm. Eventually she decides not to; she probably wouldn't want to know if they'd stuck one in her head. She sighs softly, pressing a gentle kiss to the side of his pectoral. The moonlight shines off the gold band on her left ring finger. "I love you, my Chefchen," she whispers to him. "No matter what."

He raises his metal hand and strokes it through her hair once. "I love you, my Darcy," he whispers back. "Always."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The call-and-response "One if by land, two if by sea / and I on the opposite shore will be" comes from H.W. Longfellow's poem "Paul Revere's Ride," which glamorizes (and, many historians would argue, far overstates) Paul Revere's role in warning the Concord (Mass.) militia that British regular troops had been mobilized to put down what was about to become the American Revolution. The poem was written in 1860, so it's highly likely that, while Darcy was probably at least _familiar_ with the poem from grade school, a school-age Bucky would certainly have read and might have even had to memorize part or all of it. (MY HISTORY KNOWLEDGE, LET ME SHOW YOU IT.)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which many of your questions will be answered, and many others will not. WOO!

**November 2010**

**Washington, D.C.**

_"...handled his father, we can handle him, too."_

Snegurka is lying on a gurney in a bank vault that's been repurposed into a medical room. She is under a heat lamp.

_"His father was a drunk and an alcoholic; it was simple to manage a car accident. You're talking about taking out the asshole with the Iron Man suit who basically armed the Armed Forces."_

She rolls her head to the left and sees Winter Soldier lying on another gurney under another heat lamp. He blinks at her and begins to push himself into a sitting position.

_"Which is why I've decided to pull out the big guns on this one."_

Shivering hard, she manages to push herself upright just as the door swings open. Two men in suits breeze into the room, followed by Technician Aronov, who has apparently become an old man while she was sleeping. She takes them in with all of her senses, her implant seeking out and locating the nearest wireless signal. She plugs into it and bites her tongue to keep from gasping at the sudden flood of information - software and firmware updates, security codes, maps, schematics, building plans, something about a giant green rage monster? -  _ terabytes _ of pure data flooding through her microchips and into her brain. She shunts the flow off to the side, letting the information simply drain in. She'll sort it all later.

She looks up at the men, and her implant identifies them almost instantly. The dark-haired man: Stern, U.S. Senator. The blond man: Pierce, high-ranking HYDRA officer, and member of the World Security Council.  _ What the fuck? _ she thinks. 

But Pierce is looking at them expectantly, so she shoves her confusion away for a moment. "Sir," she says, gritting her teeth to force the words out around the cold-sleep shivers and speaking in English because that's what she heard them speaking. "Code name: Snow Maiden active, sir."

From behind her, she hears, "Code name: Winter Soldier active, sir."

"Good," Pierce says. "Aronov?"

Aronov's eyes are covered by dark glasses; he has apparently lost all his vision since putting them to sleep. Snegurka is sorry to see it. But he turns toward her unerringly, and he says in Russian, "Snegurochka, report your orders."

That's not protocol. That's not anything like protocol. There is no corresponding tug at her mind to coerce her speech. She takes a breath. "Active orders: undefined," she replies. She stops, and feels no compulsion to continue.

Aronov nods, then turns his head. "Soldatushki," he says, using the cutesy diminutive of the Russian word for soldier, which nobody has ever applied to Winter Soldier before and probably never will again. "Report your orders."

He says, "Active orders: undefined."

Aronov turns to Pierce and says, in English, "They are ready for orders, sir."

"Good," Pierce says. He walks over to a nearby table, where Snegurka can see their tactical gear spilling out of a box, and the chair and the cryostasis pods behind it. He picks up a manila folder. He flips it open and comes back. When he holds it up, it is displaying an eight-by-ten portrait of a dark-haired man with a goatee and a sarcastic expression. "This is your target," Pierce says. "He's currently based out of New York. You'll be flown there by helicopter, and you'll have ten hours from the time you're dropped off to confirm your kill."

Snegurka nods, committing the face to memory. She doesn't look him up, despite the easy availability of the information; there's time for that in a moment. "Long term orders, sir?"

Pierce raises an eyebrow at her. "What long term orders?"

"For after this target is eliminated," Winter Soldier explains. "On our last assignment, we served as the heads of personal security for General Vasily Karpov in Istanbul for just over five years, until he died from old age. There was no pressing need for our services anywhere else at that time, so we were put away until the Soviet Union should have need for us again."

Stern laughs mockingly. "Guess they missed the Wall," he says.

Pierce frowns at them both. "The Soviet Union doesn't exist any more," he says. "You belong to HYDRA now."

Snegurka shrugs. "With all due respect, sir, we don't really care who our masters are. We follow orders and we serve. I'm only asking what our long-term orders will be once this target is eliminated, sir."

"There are no long-term orders. Once this job is done, you'll go back into cryofreeze until we need you again."

Snegurka frowns.

Pierce's eyebrows draw together. "Is there a problem, soldier?"

"He's the Soldier, sir," Snegurka replies. "I'm called Snow Maiden." The backhanded blow to her mouth, when it comes, is not unexpected. Snegurka spits blood onto the tiled floor and then looks up at the blond man. "Thank you for correcting me, sir."

"You've been given a lot of freedom inside that pretty head, I think," Pierce says softly. "It's made you forget what you really are." He looks back and forth between her and Winter Soldier for a long moment, and then he smirks. "I think maybe it's time for you to remember."

He turns to Aronov. "I want them both wiped," he says. "If there isn't already a blank slate protocol, then make one. I don't want a trace of personality left in there."

Snegurka's fists clench around the thin mattress on the gurney.

"With all due respect, sir," Aronov says softly, "we found over many years of trial and error that they are  _ much _ more effective when - "

"I'm not in the habit of repeating myself, Aronov," Pierce interrupts. "I said I want blank slates. It's ridiculous to have two expensive assets like this in the same place, anyway. Wipe them both. Once Stark is dead, we'll send one of them back to Europe in case there's a need."

"Yes, sir," Aronov replies softly.

She hears the mechanisms in Winter Soldier's arm whir, the plates shifting as he clenches his own fists.

Pierce turns and leaves the room. Stern follows him out. There is absolute silence in the vault except for the sound of their feet walking away.

Snegurka says, very softly, "Will you kill us both, then, Aronov?"

Aronov, in his regular voice, replies, "Snegurochka, I believe the Winter Soldier's arm needs maintenance before he can be wiped." He pauses, crossing the room slowly and taking a seat in the wiping chair. "There appears to be an anomaly in the upper bicep."

"Yes, sir," Snegurka says. She slides off the gurney, grateful for the heat lamp that brought her back to full function  _ much _ faster than last time. She goes to the toolbox on the counter nearby and opens it, finding the little pack of screwdrivers that she's going to need. She accesses that hidden partition inside her head and opens the schematic, and then she comes to Winter Soldier's side. She presses her lips to his, very briefly, and she whispers, "Chefchen, I need you to trust me."

He doesn't even hesitate; he just nods and holds out his arm.

It is the work of perhaps ten minutes to get the two trackers and the explosive out of his arm. She closes the panel and carefully sets the items all aside. Then she crosses to the table and begins sorting through the tactical gear. Winter Soldier steps up beside her, and they both dress quickly, sturdy pants with some kind of metal infused in the weave, strong but comfortable combat boots, undershirts of some slick material, matching black Kevlar tops. There are goggles and masks and winter coats as well, but they purposely ignore them. Snegurka slips the packet of tools into one of her many pockets, and Winter Soldier checks the security of her braid.

Aronov says, "There is weaponry in the larger deposit boxes."

They raid the stash. To say that there is weaponry is to vastly understate the armory that is available for them. There is a vast assortment of small knives, perfect for slipping up sleeves and into boots; there are larger knives to be tucked into the waistbands of their pants. There are a wide variety of handguns, large and small, which go into backpacks along with as much ammunition as they can reasonably carry. There are also automatic weapons, but after consultation, they decide to forego these as less accurate and more likely to attract attention.

Once they are done, they turn back to Aronov. He says, "I would give you one other thing, Snegurochka, but I would ask for a favor in return."

"Name your trade," she says.

He smiles at her, and he points to a filing cabinet. "Look in the top drawer."

She goes, and she looks. It is full of old, yellowing manila folders. She flips through the tabs, and blinks when she finds one labeled Winter Soldier and one labeled Snow Maiden. "What is this?" she asks, pulling them out.

"Take those with you," he says. "Don't look at them now. Not until you're safe. What's inside of them will be a distraction that you absolutely cannot afford."

"And what do you want in return for these files?" Winter Soldier asks suddenly, looking at them over Snegurka's shoulder.

"I am an old man," Aronov replies. "And when I was a young man, I did bad things. At first I did not question them; they were advances in science in service to the State. But then I watched my superiors torture a young girl for no other reason than because they thought it might work, and I knew that it was wrong. And you do not remember it, Snegurochka, but I held your shoulders as you laid on the table when they put that implant into your head the first time, and you cried for your mother, and I told you stories from my homeland to calm you, and I fell in love with you."

Snegurka swallows hard, not knowing what to say. But he doesn't wait for her to reply. He says, "So. I am an old man who has done bad things. But now I will do this good thing, and I hope that it will be enough. And I would ask a thing of you, Snegurochka, and tell you a thing. I would ask you to kiss me, just once. And I will tell you that when they discover you are gone, they will question me without mercy until I tell them everything that I know."

Snegurka understands. She hands the folders to Winter Soldier, takes three steps forward and reaches out to cup Aronov's chin. His skin is paper-thin beneath her fingers, fragile and dry. She leans down and presses her lips to his, soft and warm, and she kisses him. His breath catches in his throat and he makes a tiny, helpless sound. She kisses him again, her other hand coming up to thread into the thin, silvery strands of his hair. And when she releases his lips, she gives a quick, sharp twist with both hands.

She leans his body gently back into the chair, and then looks up at Winter Soldier, who has finished tucking the files under his Kevlar shirt. "Let's go," he says, and she nods.

She activates the infrared scanner and studies the building. "Guards," she says, pointing. "Two at the end of the hall, two more in the main lobby. Apparently they thought we were just a pair of mindless drones."

He snorts. "Never heard that one before."

"No, me neither." She shakes her head. "So shall we do the robot-walk out there?"

He nods. "Might as well do it the easy way."

She grins. "Saves on ammo." She picks up the explosive device that was in Winter Soldier's arm and scans it. It emits a very weak wireless signal - just enough for a remote detonation. She locates its frequency and says, "I can think of one thing we might do on the way out, though."

He smiles. "I ever tell you I like the way you think, кукла?"

"Not in at least the last thirty minutes," she replies, batting her eyes at him.

He leans over and kisses her hard. "I fucking  _ love _ the way you think," he whispers against her lips. "Now come on. Let's get the hell out of here."

They tuck their masks and goggles into their bags and don their coats, and they prepare for war.

The first set of guards is easy to incapacitate. They are expecting two mindless drones to come out of the vault on their way to complete their mission, and so they don't guard themselves as they should against sudden physical attack from up close. "Sloppy," Winter Soldier chides them as he looks down at their bodies.

"Stupid," Snow Maiden agrees. In a moment of inspiration, she relieves both men of their wallets. Dead men don't need currency, after all.

The second set of guards is not so sloppy; they step back and away from the doors, their weapons up and ready. Snegurka casually drops the explosive device on a table in the center of the lobby area when she brushes past it on the way out; neither of them looks anywhere except directly forward as they walk.

They push through the glass doors and step out onto the sidewalk.

Snegurka activates the explosive remotely. It begins beeping.

They let the glass doors swing shut behind them and start across the street against the light, falling into step as they always do when they're working.

A car horn beeps at them.

The bank explodes.

They look neither to the right nor to the left; instead they keep walking. Somewhere in the distance, a siren begins to scream. Just up the block, a bus is pulling to a stop; without even consulting one another, they both immediately step into line to climb aboard. Snegurka flips through one of the guards' wallets and finds a MetroRail card; she swipes this through the card reader as she climbs onto the bus, and then hands it to Winter Soldier so that he can do the same.

They sit together near the center of the bus. Nobody pays much attention to them; everyone is engrossed in small handheld devices that seem to function as communication tools. It's a very odd sight.

One person does notice; about five blocks into their trip, Snegurka notices a small child staring at her. The dark-skinned little boy is sitting beside a woman of the same shade, and Snegurka assumes this woman is his mother. He stares at Snegurka as though she contains all the secrets of the universe. She stares back. After about a block of this, she crosses her eyes.

The boy gasps softly, turning his face to bury it into his mother's side. Chuckling softly to herself, Snegurka turns her attention to Winter Soldier. "Chefchen, do you know where we are?" she murmurs in German.

He nods, pointing out the window at a huge, white stone building. "That is the White House," he murmurs back. "Where the President of the United States lives."

Snegurka raises an eyebrow. America? What the  _ hell _ are they doing in America?

She blinks up at Winter Soldier. "Do you suppose that what he said about the Soviet Union being no more is true?"

"There is no reason why it shouldn't be," Winter Soldier replies. "Regimes rise and fall every day. You know that as well as I do."

She hums in agreement. Then she says, "We need to get someplace quiet."

He looks down at her. "Are you all right?"

She shakes her head. "Not really. The connection built into my most recent implant upgrade was meant to give me a wireless connection to the computers at the base, but apparently it's become widespread technology because I'm getting connections to  _ everything. _ It's very distracting. Plus, I downloaded a  _ lot _ of data before we blew that bank, and I need to process it before we go blundering off into something we don't know about. I'm not sure how long we've been asleep this time, Chefchen, but I'm pretty sure it's been awhile."

He nods. "Let's get out of the city," he says. "We'll go to ground somewhere else."

"Sounds good."

They ride the bus to the end of the line, then steal a car from the parking lot of a supermarket and drive into Virginia. It's not far to a small university town called Willowdale, and Winter Soldier ditches the car in one of the university's parking lots. They cross the campus and catch another city bus, which drops them off three blocks up from a small motel that rents rooms by the day, week, or month. Snegurka goes inside and takes a room for a week.

They cross the street to a small grocery store and buy peanut butter, bread, and cans of tomato juice, and then they hole themselves up in the motel room. They take a little bit of time to reacquaint themselves with each other, and then after a shower, Snegurka seats herself on the bed, her back against the wall, and closes her eyes.

She begins filtering through the information available to her. A great deal of it is unrelated and not yet important - the file about the giant green rage monster, for example, looks interesting, but now is really not the time. She dives in deep, hunting for anything that might prove to be of use. As the data begins to settle itself into her brain, she finds what she's looking for.

After Karpov died, she and Winter Soldier were decommissioned. When the Soviet Union fell two years later in 1991, Lukin had them both stored at a facility in the Balkans, along with a number of other suspended or canceled Department X projects. They were later sold to a buyer from HYDRA and shipped to the United States, where they were again stored in the bank building against a future need. That need, it seems, had come in the form of a man called Tony Stark, the CEO of Stark Industries, which was a major weapons manufacturing firm. Stark's father, Howard, had been a major player on the American side of World War II, and had been instrumental in the development of their super soldier project and the creation of Captain America. The son turned out to be a genius at weapons development. He was also a lecher and a drunk, which made it easy for him to be controlled by a HYDRA operative called Stane, who had ingratiated himself into the Stark family as a personal friend.

But Stane, it appears to Snegurka, had gotten greedy, and through a series of misadventures caused by Stane, Stark had ended up developing an incredibly powerful weaponized suit. HYDRA wants that suit, and the easiest way to get it would be to kill Stark. Unfortunately, Stark doesn't appear easy to kill. Thus, this Alexander Pierce had elected to activate Winter Soldier and Snow Maiden. Only he apparently had not been thoroughly briefed on who and what he was dealing with.

She scoffs aloud. "They always think they're dealing with mindless drones," she says.

Winter Soldier snorts. "I'm gettin' pretty tired of that."

"Me, too," Snegurka responds. "I wonder how they're taking our little letter of resignation."

He laughs. "Probably not very well."

"Well, let me sit here a little while longer and see if I can dredge up some sympathy." Snegurka smirks, then goes back to sorting through information. Now that she's past the specific circumstances, she begins filtering through everything she can find on current culture, technology, and politics. She is astonished by what she discovers. She assimilates the idea of the Internet and mobile communications technology fairly quickly - she has her implant, after all, which is very like the Internet, and government technology has always been at least five to ten years more advanced than consumer-level tech, but she is also appalled at the idea of people voluntarily carrying tiny track-and-record devices - and in fact competing to see whose tiny track-and-record device could track and record them  _ better _ . 

She flashes through twenty-three years of music and movies as things she can catch up on later, at her leisure. She reviews the Cold War from the American perspective, the period of increasingly desperate third-world violence during the 1990s that most Americans perceived as an era of peace and prosperity, and brushes up on the so-called War on Terror. She recognizes her own and Winter Soldier's shadows in certain places; official records refer to them both separately and together as ghost operatives, and opinions appear to be divided about whether or not they actually exist. She finds a list of confirmed kills that numbers around seventy; according to her admittedly imperfect memory, it's short by at least twenty-five.

She reaches out with her implant and locates an unsecured connection to the Internet. She starts surfing randomly, wondering what it can tell her, and discovers other things that are useful to know. She finds, on a website about civil liberties, that many cities are full of surveillance cameras and that no one seems to know what is done with the footage or who has access to it. She learns, from a survey of blogging sites, that authoritarian violence has become the norm in the so-called land of the free, and that poor people of color are often subjected to it randomly under the guise of law enforcement. She learns from Twitter that the U.S. has abandoned its pretenses of peacefulness and begun conducting its illegal territorial warfare in the broad light of day, flouting international laws and the protests of its own citizens in the process.

She discovers Wikipedia. From there, she accidentally follows a link toTVTropes. Forty-five minutes later, her head pounding, she forces herself to disconnect and shakes her head to clear it, looking up at Winter Soldier. "We need to stay out of the cities," she manages to say before passing out from the information overload.

When she wakes up, he is sitting beside her on the bed with a manila folder open in his lap. He is studying it with a faint frown on his face. She rubs at her sleepy eyes and sits up, leaning against his shoulder groggily. "What?" she says simply.

"These files," he says. "It's... I don't like it."

"Okay," she says. "Why?"

He flips back to the beginning of the file and shows her a photograph of himself inside the stasis tube. She's seen this before, in person, and she nods. Then he shows her another photograph of himself - this time in black and white, wearing what looks like an American military uniform. She blinks in surprise. "Is that... what is that?"

"That," he replies, "is the uniform of a sergeant in the U.S. Army, circa 1942."

She stares for a moment, her fingers reaching out to brush over the face in the photo, so similar and yet so different to the one that is so dear to her. "So... you're an American?"

"Apparently," he replies. He stops for a minute, and when he speaks again, his voice is rough. "It says here that my name was Barnes. James Barnes."

And something pings in the back of Snegurka's mind. She closes her eyes for a second, filtering through information, and she gasps when she finds it. "Боже мой," she murmurs. "James Barnes was a Howling Commando."

He jerks a little bit at the words, looking over at her. "What does that mean?"

"It... Okay, you know about the American super soldier project and Captain America?" When he nods, she continues: "The Howling Commandos - that's the troop of specialists that Captain America led. James Barnes, called Bucky, was the second in command, and according to all the records, he and Steve Rogers were best friends their whole lives." She pulls on a few related threads. "Oh," she says. She grabs the remote control and flips on the television, changing the channel. "There's a documentary on right now. That's useful."

He glances over at her. "Don't you wanna look at your file?"

"Eh." She shrugs. "Eventually, I guess. Let's focus on one thing at a time, though, okay?"

He doesn't look totally convinced, but he lets her settle next to him and they watch the documentary together, and every time they show footage of a tall, blond Adonis in a spangled outfit fighting or talking or laughing with an American soldier who has Winter Soldier's face, he is grateful for her presence. He can't imagine trying to do this without her.

~*~

They end up spending three months in that motel while she assimilates this brave new world through her implant and works on bringing him up to speed along with her. They watch reruns of old television shows to acquaint themselves with American culture, and they watch FOX News and MSNBC to acquaint themselves with the current political climate.

Her folder remains unread, a thread she has not yet decided she's ready to pull.

Sometimes he has nightmares. He dreams about that tall, blond American in the fancy uniform; he dreams about a man with a rattish face and round eyeglasses. He dreams about a city of brick and brownstone; he dreams about the war-ravaged European countryside. Sometimes he dreams about the killing; sometimes he dreams about the times in between when they were allowed to live.

She wonders what it says about her that she doesn't dream much at all.

He starts to remember things about his life from before; he tells her stories, sometimes, about growing up in the 1920s and 1930s and about Captain America, who was just called Steve Rogers then. He tells her about his sisters, when he remembers them, and about Steve's Ma who died of tuberculosis.

She wonders if she had siblings or a mother.

They work together to develop new aliases; it's not terribly hard, in this new digital age, to crack into unsecured school system records and build students; it's not hard to infiltrate the DMV for drivers' licenses. Breaking into the Social Security Administration takes a little more time and effort. Breaking into a local bank takes no time at all. Convincing him that she does not want to look at her file when asking him to check it for her own birth name takes most of a day and leaves her frustrated and cranky.

By the time they are done, James Barnes was born in Brooklyn in 1979, attended public school, and then served in the Army for ten years. He was wounded in combat and qualified for an experimental prosthetic limb. Darcy Lewis was born in Utah in 1989, also attended public school, and then went to college for political science but did not finish. She and James Barnes were married in 2008.

When she finds the job posting for the internship - an accidental discovery while cruising the local university's website - she hits on a plan. She reconfigures her background a bit, making herself a current student, and she puts together an application, which she submits about an hour before the deadline. Then, just to hedge her bets a little bit, she deletes all the competition.

A week later, Darcy Lewis and her husband get on a Greyhound bus to New Mexico.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *showers you with feels*

**June 2011**

**Puente Antiguo, New Mexico**

Puente Antiguo is a great place for a fresh start, in Darcy's opinion. It is small and quiet, there are no surveillance cameras anywhere, and nobody minds that she and James are a little unusual. Jane Foster is plenty unusual, and most of the local residents just seem to consider that weirdness is part and parcel of academia.

James is able to find work very quickly in a local garage; it turns out that he can fix almost anything mechanical that anyone brings to him, so not only is he able to keep all the cars in town running smoothly, but he also starts getting calls on his off time to swing by the bar-and-hamburger-place to bang on their cooler, or Mrs. Jenkins's house to see why her freezer has stopped making ice. Between the money he brings in and the stipend that Darcy earns as Jane's intern, they are able to begin building a tidy little nest egg, augmented on the sly every so often with a little bit of money drawn out of the bank account that James established back when they were still in Turkey. (And  _ that _ account holds a tidy little sum itself; turns out that when you leave a decent-sized lump of funds to lie dormant for over two decades, it grows like a slow plant.) 

Darcy plays a part in Puente Antiguo. It's not the first time she's done so, but it's certainly the first time she's done so for an extended period of time. She plays a slightly ditzy, but fearsomely well-organized, college student with a penchant for loud music, bad boys, and too many pop culture references - having the Internet running through her head twenty-four-seven helps with that. She finds that people, especially men, will judge her by her appearance before anything else, and she pads her bra enough that most people never look past her perceived cup size. It makes James fractious, because too many men are too poorly mannered, but Darcy isn't worried.

It's not like she's going to become a statistic, and if some guy decides that an abundant cleavage is an invitation, she can teach him to keep his hands to himself, and the next girl might be just a little bit safer.

The internship offered room and board in addition to the stipend; originally, Jane had planned on having her intern share space with her in the travel trailer, but this proved untenable when the intern came with a husband in tow. Fortunately, there is a single office space with a door at the back of the old car dealership that is their base of operations, and it is simple as anything to retrofit that space into a tiny bedroom for James and Darcy. This comes with the added bonus of Jane's almost pathological dislike for overhearing them have sex; she sometimes proves impossible to pry away from her research, so if she goes more than twenty hours in the lab without at least a five hour break, Darcy and James just close themselves up into their bedroom and have loud sex. Usually within five minutes, Jane is gone from the lab and hidden in the trailer, sleeping.

As the weeks of the internship pass, Darcy finds herself actually liking Jane. She is fascinated with the way Jane's mind works, with the things that Jane knows. Darcy knows engineering and computers, but Jane knows physics and space. They work together well; Jane can explain what she wants a piece of equipment to do, and Darcy can help her figure out the best way to do it. Darcy helps Jane to develop new database software for cataloging experiment results, and Jane actually teaches Darcy what some of the experiments are for rather than just expecting her to plug meaningless data into the computer.

James likes Jane, too: he's amused by her fascination with his prosthetic arm, and he sometimes uses it to get Jane's attention when Jane gets too curious about Darcy's prosthetic eye. He makes it his business to accompany them out into the desert when they go on night trips, overplaying the protective part to make Darcy roll her eyes. Things are working out well for everyone all around. And then, one night, Jane spots a subtle aurora in the sky while they're out in the desert at their usual sky-watching spot.

James is tinkering under the hood of the Pinzgauer and Darcy is digging through the equipment for a particular hand-held scanner when Jane says, "Somebody come here and look at this and tell me I've finally lost it."

James and Darcy both stroll over to the telescope where Jane is standing, craning her neck back to look at the sky. James leans over and peers into the eyepiece of the telescope, then looks up, then back into the eyepiece. "Uh," he says eloquently.

Darcy gives him a light shove and he moves, and she takes his place. She copies his actions. And then she says, "Nah, boss lady, you're not cracked. That's definitely an aurora where an aurora isn't supposed to be."

Jane nods. "I need Erik," she says, and begins packing up the equipment. "Come on, let's head back."

"Just a second," James says. "I need to put some parts back."

Darcy rolls her eyes and helps Jane pack up the Pinz.

A few days later, Erik Selvig arrives to see what it is that Jane is babbling about. The four of them drive out into the desert - James likes to be involved in the science because he's apparently a secret nerd - and a freak storm blows up out of nowhere and then Jane grabs the wheel of the Pinz when Darcy would have steered it to safety and they slam into a tall, blond, homeless guy who's apparently nuts for hammers.

After dropping off the crazed man calling himself Thor at the hospital, they make their way back to the lab. Jane and Erik go crazy over readings, but after Jane assures Darcy that she isn't needed just then, Darcy retreats to the office/bedroom and takes James with her for a few hours of well-deserved sleep. The next morning, James makes his way to the garage up the street while Darcy starts looking over Jane and Erik's shoulders.

They are on their way to the hospital to re-collect the possibly not-so-crazy guy when a quiet alarm goes off inside Darcy's head. Her implant is picking up a familiar signal, one it recognizes from before. It is a signal that matches one that she attached to when she and James woke the last time, inside that HYDRA base.

She reaches out and seizes it, investigating carefully, and discovers that SHIELD is in the area, investigating some sort of unknown object that apparently fell from outer space. And Jane is already on their radar. After a moment to thank whatever deity is watching out for her, she accesses the cellular network and sends a text message to James's phone. Two simple words:  _ Go dark. _

Almost immediately, his cell signal vanishes from the network. Darcy steps into the diner bathroom and double-checks her disguise. It's simple, but effective: her ample (and falsified) cleavage, her glasses, her cherry-red lipstick. She unties her hair from its customary braid and lets it fall in unruly waves around her shoulders, then tugs a knit cap on over the top of it. She could not look less like Snow Maiden without surgical alterations. Content, she steps back out into the main dining room just in time to watch Thor smash his coffee cup on the floor.

She rolls her eyes.

It's a struggle not to react when the part of her mind that's monitoring the SHIELD frequency reports that the agents are about to ransack the lab. Instead, she pulls her phone out and pretends to be talking on it as she comes back to the table. "No," she says. "Go ahead; we'll be fine here. No, I love you, too. Call me when you get there." She pretends to hang up, pushes her phone into her pocket. "James just got a call," she says to the table at large. "Family emergency; he's had to go back East for a few days."

"Oh, no!" Jane says. "I hope everything is okay."

Darcy nods. "It'll be all right; he just has to deal with it. You know how family is."

A bit later, she's glad she had the foresight to alibi him with the others; Agent Phil Coulson of SHIELD is a little too curious about her absent husband James Barnes, and Darcy is glad to be able to state simply that he had to go back East just this morning, and that the rest of anything really isn't Agent Coulson's business. The fact that he's welcome to take his curiosity and go fuck himself with it is unspoken but clearly understood.

Selvig warns them about SHIELD; he tells them about a colleague he had who was studying gamma radiation who may or may not have been disappeared by them. Darcy's money would be on a yes answer to that question. Still, when it comes time to retrieve Thor from SHIELD's clutches, she's not afraid; she hacks the DMV quickly and builds a fake I.D. for Thor. She knows it will be detected; that's fine. She  _ wants _ SHIELD to have a low estimation of her skills. She has a feeling they'll let him go anyway, and she turns out to be right.

The man who follows Thor and Selvig from the base is good. He's very good. He's also an anomaly, with that collapsible bow and the quiver of arrows. Darcy is better. In her tac suit and mask, she switches on her night vision and follows the follower, watching him even as he watches Thor and Selvig. Fortunately, nothing more interesting than a bar brawl occurs, and in the late hours, Thor carries Selvig back to the lab.

James is waiting for her in the closed-up dress shop across the street with a change of clothes for her. Darcy slips into the building and they embrace quickly, and she fills him in on everything that's happened so far. "This Coulson," she says as she changes, "he seems all right, except that he was a little too interested in you, and I can't figure out why. His work records don't give me anything, so I'm going to look into his personals tonight. Everything I can think of."

James nods. "Let me know what you find out," he says. "I'll nest here until they're gone. Send a signal if you need me."

She smiles, kissing him soft and slow. "I always need you," she promises him. And then she's gone, slipping into the lab and heading for her bed.

In the morning, the world goes to hell.

Thor's friends arrive, telling him that his brother is a liar. Then a massive mechanical monster that shoots fire out of its face arrives and proceeds to tear up the town. Darcy is torn between imperatives; her training is screaming self-protection but her instincts are screaming at her to protect others. She compromises, and starts hurrying everyone away from the metal monster as quickly as she can. Trying to fight the thing would do no good, and everything in her rebels against the idea of worthless self-sacrifice.

And then that turns out to be exactly what saves them all, but Thor is gone, and Jane is even more obsessed than ever, and SHIELD wants to enfold her into its bosom. Selvig goes; the promise of unlimited research funding is too strong a siren song for him to resist.

Jane wavers; she wants the funding, certainly, but she is still angry that SHIELD stole all her equipment and research and she would rather have another option, because she knows that the only reason they want her is so that they can leverage her against Thor if he ever comes back. Darcy quietly advises caution, and Jane listens.

And then Tony Stark arrives.

He lands on the street in front of the lab with a bang, and he retracts his faceplate as he walks into the lab. "Doctor Foster," he calls out.

Jane looks up from her readouts and blinks. "I... uh... Mr. Stark?"

"Tony," Tony replies. He looks around the lab. "How attached to this place are you?"

Jane waggles her head back and forth in a  _ so-so _ gesture. "It depends. Why are you asking?"

"Because I've been following your work on the Einstein-Rosen bridge since you were a graduate student," he says frankly. "And I think you're a genius. A little cracked, maybe, but a genius. And I have an astrophysics lab and a big flat roof that'd be perfect for some telescopes and almost unlimited access to a great big radio telescope array in upstate New York."

"The Bifröst site is here," Jane points out.

Tony shrugs as best he can inside the suit. "Travel allowances," he says.

Jane's eyes narrow. "I have an intern. She's trained the way I like her, but her internship is about to be up."

"I'm pretty sure I can afford a lab assistant." He glances at Darcy. "Anything you want to add to the negotiations?"

Darcy bites her lip, considering him and the information she has about him. "I've got a husband," she says finally. "He's a disabled veteran. He doesn't have any degrees, but he's good with his hands and he can fix almost anything."

"I love engineers," Tony replies. "Some of my best friends are engineers. I have a whole section of R&D devoted to engineering." He pauses. "Housing's included; there's apartments in the Tower complex."

Jane and Darcy look at one another for a minute, Jane clearly seeking advice. Darcy gnaws on her lip for a long moment before finally giving a tiny nod. It's better than SHIELD, and they both know it. Jane sighs softly. "All right, Mr. Stark," she says. "When do we start?"

"Tony," Tony says again. "And you just did." He grins.

~*~

**September 2011**

**Ithaca, NY**

"How are you guys settling in?"

Darcy blinks, looking up from the computer screen in front of her, and discovers her boss-slash-friend standing there with a box full of take-out food. "Uh?"

Jane rolls her eyes, snapping her fingers in front of Darcy's face. "Come out of it!"

Darcy's eyes narrow. "That's  _ rich _ , coming from you."

Jane grins. "I know, right? I thought the irony might be funny."

"It's something, all right," Darcy replies, saving her work and taking the proffered box. "What was the question?"

"How are you guys settling in? In the tower and all."

"Oh, man." Darcy sighed, flipping the box open and grinning at the sight of the huge meatball sub in front of her. "Ooh, my favorite. You're the best, boss-lady."

Jane laughs softly. "Stop trying to deflect. Is it all right?"

"It's great, really," Darcy assures her. "The apartment is  _ way _ better than anything we could have afforded on our own; we probably would have ended up in Jersey, and James would  _ not _ have liked that. He is Brooklyn through and through."

"I'm surprised he's willing to live in Manhattan," Jane comments.

Darcy laughs. "Apparently free rent is worth crossing the Brooklyn Bridge for."

"And his job, he's doing okay?"

"He loves it," Darcy assures her. "Stark's got him breaking things in R&D. I honestly think it's the happiest he's been in years."

"And you?" Jane asks, leaning forward, her plastic fork hovering over her grilled chicken Caesar. "Are you doing okay?"

"I'm doing great," Darcy assures her. "Really. Or I would be if I could find decent Turkish food. I  _ miss _ that."

"I didn't know you liked Turkish food," Jane comments.

"Oh, yeah," Darcy says. "When I was younger, I lived in Istanbul for awhile. I  _ weep _ for some of the stuff we ate while we were there."

Jane's head cocks and she studies Darcy for a moment. Darcy wonders briefly if the offering of a piece of her past was a mistake; Jane sometimes gets like a bloodhound on the scent, especially if she thinks Darcy's being secretive. She seems to think that because they are friends, they should have no secrets from one another. Fortunately, this time, she lets it go and changes the subject. "Did you ever get your credits managed?"

Darcy nods, stuffing her sandwich into her mouth and thinking quickly about how to derail that train of conversation. She almost wishes that Jane  _ had _ asked her about Istanbul; it would be easier to lie creatively about that than about her fictional education at Culver. "It's all handled," she says instead. "Hey, what do you hear from Erik?"

Jane frowns. "I haven't heard from him in awhile," she admits. "I'm really starting to worry. Remember how he talked about that friend of his who worked with gamma radiation, and how SHIELD came sniffing around and then the friend disappeared?"

"Yeah." Darcy's brow wrinkles. "I wonder if that suit that stole your equipment knows anything about him."

"Apparently he's not taking my calls," Jane replies, her voice dry as the New Mexico desert.

"Surprise, surprise," Darcy grumbles. "Send him an email. Erik, I mean. If you don't hear back from him in a week or so, I'll start digging and see what I can find."

"Darcy Lewis," Jane admonishes her, pointing her fork at Darcy. "Don't you  _ dare _ get caught hacking the SHIELD mainframes."

Darcy laughs. "Oh, Janey," she replies. "I never get caught."

~*~

**December 2011**

**New York, NY**

When Darcy opens the door of her apartment on the third of December, she is not prepared for the sight that greets her. "Um."

James leans around the massive conifer standing in the corner of the living room. "Hey,  кукла," he says, grinning. "What do you think?"

Darcy enters the room, pushing the door shut behind her, and stares for a moment. "So... so this is a thing we're doing now?"

His face falls, just a little. "You don't like it?"

"No, no, I didn't say that," she replies, waving a hand as if to ward off his words. "I mean, I didn't really  _ expect _ it, but... it's very... um... sparkly?"

"You don't like it."

She puts a hand over her eyes. "I did not say that, James," she says forcefully. "I did not at any point say that I did not like it."

"Well,  _ do _ you like it?"

She sighs heavily, hangs her bag on the coat tree, and turns to take in the monstrosity in the corner. It's a fresh tree, already dropping needles on the carpet, and it's got multicolored, blinking lights wrapped all around it. It's got silver tinsel thrown all over it, and glass balls hanging from almost every branch. The top is adorned with a huge silver star. She sighs again, reaching over to flick the ceiling light off, and she stands very still for a moment, appreciating the aesthetic effect of all that silver and glitter and unrestrained multicolored capitalism.

"It's beautiful, James," she says softly, holding out a hand to him. "Come here and look at it."

Grinning broadly, he comes, taking her hand and pulling her close. "Never really had a proper tree as a kid," he admits. "Too damn poor. Then the war, and, well, you know. So I thought we should have a tree this year. Saw these in a lot a few blocks up; the Boy Scouts were sellin' em. So I figured what the hell, right?"

"Right," she says softly, wrapping her arms around his waist. Then she laughs softly. "Thank you for not waiting until the last minute to tell me you wanted to do Christmas. I hadn't even thought about it, so I don't have a present for you yet."

"You don't have to - "

She puts a finger across his lips. "Hush, Chefchen."

He laughs softly, then bends down to kiss her. "You know," he says, "I never knew what we were missing until suddenly we had it again."

She bites her lip, restraining herself from reminding him that  _ they _ don't have anything;  _ he _ has his memories back from before the war.  _ She _ has vague memories of spending her teen years in a training camp, but nothing at all before that. She isn't going to ruin this for him, though. Instead, she lets him have his moment, lets him turn on some low, quiet music and dance her around their living room, and then lay her down and make love to her on the floor in front of the tree. 

New York has been a godsend for both of them. Steady jobs and a real home have gone a long way toward making both of them feel like real people and not just runaway assassin-bots, and they have gone from talking quietly at night about their plans for the next day or week to their plans for the next year or two years. The apartment has two bedrooms, and though James hasn't said anything to her directly (yet), she knows that if she looked at his internet search history, she'd find queries about adopting children. Just the idea terrifies her: something else for HYDRA to leverage against them if they're ever found? She wants to throw up at the very thought of it. But James wants it, and if he can come up with a plan to make it work... well, the Stark complex is pretty secure, even if they live in one of the smaller buildings and not the Tower itself, and maybe it's something that could happen.

She isn't going to be the one to tell him it can't. He needs his dreams to cling to; they help remind him that he's human.

They lie together in the aftermath, wrapped around one another under the chenille throw from the back of the couch, and he tells her all about the last Christmas he spent with Steve Rogers in Brooklyn, and how they didn't have money for a tree or presents or anything, but he worked some extra shifts for the grocer and was paid in black-market beef, and Steve drew him some charcoal sketches of his family. "It was maybe the best Christmas I ever had before the war," he says. He rests his head on her stomach, his metal arm wrapped around her waist, and she runs her fingers through his long hair and lets him talk.

He misses that life from before; she can't remember hers. It isn't the first time she's felt the lack, and she's pretty sure it won't be the last. She fights against the burn of jealousy deep in her chest; she knows she had a mother, and she wishes she could remember her mother's face. Also not for the first time, she thinks about the files from the HYDRA base, hidden in their bedroom closet. She could open that file, she could look inside, she could see if the lost secrets of her life are hidden in its pages. But they might not be, and she's not sure she could handle the disappointment.

It's for that same reason that she hasn't looked up her name or her family on the Internet. James is fairly certain that she'd at least find herself in a missing person's report, but she hasn't looked. She isn't afraid of much in life, but she's definitely afraid of what might happen if she tugs on that thread.

So, instead, she listens to him. She lets him talk about the Commandos and about his family and about people he knew, fellows he palled around with. And she lets him talk about Steve, who was dearer to him than any brother could have been, and who, according to all the reports, was so devastated by James's apparent death that he flew an airplane into the North Atlantic just a few days later.

James shakes his head as he thinks about it. "Such a fuckin' waste," he manages, his breath hot against her belly. "He was so  _ good _ , Darce. Everything about him was good. He wasn't perfect, no way, but he  _ tried _ so hard. All he ever wanted was to matter, to be worth somethin' to somebody. But he was so sickly all the time that everybody else had to take care of him, and he didn't get a soul mark, so he didn't even have that for a consolation. And then when his Ma died, and the war came, it just seemed like Steve was destined to never amount to much of anything."

"So he volunteered for Erskine?" Darcy murmurs. "That sounds... reckless and foolhardy, honestly."

"Two words that describe Steven Grant Rogers perfectly," Bucky replies, smirking a little. "He was both of those, from head to toe. The idiot." He shakes his head. he's silent for a minute, and then he whispers, "God, I miss him."

He wraps himself around her then and cries, hot tears against her skin. It's hard for him, knowing that everyone he's ever known and loved is dead; even his sisters are gone, and they were all younger than he was. He has nothing in the world except for her. Sometimes she thinks that's fair; she, after all, has nothing in the world except for him. But it isn't fair. Life hasn't been anything like fair to either of them, and she wishes sometimes that she could fix it, go back and change whatever it was that set them both on course into the hellish existence they so recently escaped, but she can't. All she can do is hold him close while he cries, and whisper into his hair that she loves him, and she will never, ever leave him.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I'm just gonna leave this here.

**April 2012**

**New York, NY**

Darcy and James are having lunch in a tiny deli that they favor on the Lower East Side when someone comes in and starts shouting about turning on the news. They both turn to watch the broadcast, fully expecting that there is going to be another monster attack of some kind, and are astonished to see a picture of Captain America on the screen.

_ CAPTAIN AMERICA DISCOVERED IN ARCTIC ICE,  _ the caption on the news ticker reads. 

James swallows hard. "About time," he whispers, his eyes growing a little wet as they always do when he speaks of or thinks about his old friend. "It's about time they found him and brought him home."

Darcy squeezes his hand, not really knowing what to say. She is a little bit jealous, to be honest. Though he still has some patchy spots, most of James's memories have returned to him. Darcy's have not; she has nothing from  _ before _ but what Department X and their handlers chose to leave her with. After a great deal of discussion and research, they have concluded that this difference must be related to something James calls "the serum" - a cocktail of chemical mixtures injected into both of them that enable them to be stronger and faster than most humans, and to have much faster reflexes and healing, and apparently slower aging. 

"I got the serum before they started wipin' me," James told her on the night they came to that conclusion. "Long before, in fact. But you, they went the other way. They wiped you a long time before they gave you the serum. So with the healing factor, I guess my brain's always been tryin' to heal up from the wipes, but yours gets to that point and thinks that's healed."

Darcy isn't totally sure that's correct, but it sounds logical, and it's the best explanation that they have so far, so she lives with it. But she still gets jealous sometimes that he remembers his life  _ before. _

He shakes his head, turning away from the video now playing on the screen. He doesn't want to see himself standing there next to his long-lost friend. Darcy doesn't blame him. She pats his hand again and goes back to her gyro.

It turns out that they can't escape it, though; the twenty-four-hour news cycle is in love with Steve Rogers right now. There are Captain America retrospectives and Howling Commandos documentaries on the television day and night, and suddenly someone is talking about making a new Captain America movie with Liam Hemsworth as Steve and Taylor Lautner as Bucky (people on the Internet are screaming - some for, but mostly against). And then, four days later, Steve himself is on the news, and Darcy is on the floor with a weeping James in her arms because somehow, against all odds, Steve is  _ alive _ and he's  _ here in New York _ and James spends two days in bed curled up into a ball because he is afraid of what Steve will think when he knows how James spent the last seventy years.

It finally takes Darcy threatening to kidnap Steve from wherever SHIELD has stashed him and dragging him to their Tower complex apartment trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey to get James out of bed and functioning again. He isn't ready to face Steve, and he knows that Darcy isn't joking. She'd actually do it.

Thirteen days later, the world goes to hell  _ again. _

They are on the balcony of their Tower apartment when they see a great, gaping hole open up in the sky. Darcy immediately activates her implant and begins scanning emergency frequencies; she finds the one SHIELD is using and relays information to James as they scramble for their tac suits and their weapons. By the time they are armed and armored, there are aliens coming out of that giant hole in the sky, Thor is back, Iron Man is all over Midtown, and Steve is with them both, slinging his shield in full view of everyone on the street.

James puts his earpiece in and kisses Darcy hard. "Stay safe out there,  кукла," he tells her. 

"You, too, Chefchen," she replies, grinning at him hard and quick.

They separate; he gets up high, and she sticks to the ground level. They make their separate ways toward the fighting, and he finds a good nest from which to take out alien sled things as they pass him, firing round after round after round.

She reaches the place where the small jet landed just about the time Captain America and his two companions freeze in the middle of the road, staring up into the sky. She looks as well, and feels something inside of her shrink down into a tiny ball of terror at the sight of a giant whale-turtle-leviathan  _ thing _ flying through that giant hole in the sky.

"What the  _ fuck, _ " she whispers to herself. 

And then the crazy man in the blue spangled suit takes off up the road to rescue some civilian hostages while his companions - an archer Darcy's implant identifies as Barton, Clinton Francis (aka Hawkeye: SHIELD agent) and a red-haired woman Darcy (or rather, the version of her that used to be called Beta) would recognize anywhere - begin shooting at the aliens. Darcy finds herself eager to join in on this activity, and she lets her implant scan frequencies for the one their comms must be using even as she hoists her rifle to her shoulder and gives the alien that was trying to sneak up on Natalia an armor-piercing round to the face.

Natalia's head jerks around and her eyes find Darcy at once; Darcy gives her a salute and then takes out another alien. Natalia nods in return and goes back to her own work. Darcy's implant finally finds the frequency being used by these costumed morons; the first voice she recognizes is Tony Stark's. "We've got a couple of extras in play," Stark is saying. "Looks like a pair, man and a woman. One of them up high, one down low."

"I saw the woman," Natalia says into her comm. "She's probably not a friendly, but she's on our side for right now."

"As long as they're on our side for now," a man's deep voice says firmly, "that's all I care about. We can worry about friendly or unfriendly later."

"We appreciate that," Darcy says drily, and hears James chuckle softly in her ear.

A lull in the fighting brings Thor down from the sky, and a moment later a fairly nondescript man arrives on a motorbike. Captain America addresses as him as Doctor Banner. Darcy stays to the outside of the group, not wanting to get too involved, especially if Thor might recognize her, but she can clearly hear everything being said. And when Stark brings the space leviathan toward them, she clearly hears Captain America say, "Doctor Banner, now might be a really good time for you to get angry."

"That's my secret, Cap," Banner replies. "I'm always angry." And Darcy feels her mouth drop open behind her mask at the sight of Banner transforming into that same giant green rage monster that she saw in HYDRA's files.

So  _ this _ is the man who let the serum turn him into an actual monster. He doesn't look the part when he's himself. 

The leviathan goes down, and the aliens all scream; the Hulk roars back, and the fighters on the ground circle up. More leviathans begin coming out of the sky, and Darcy hears Iron Man say, "Call it, Captain."

"All right, listen up. Until we can close that portal, our priority is containment." He begins giving out assignments, placing Hawkeye on a rooftop, Stark in the air on the perimeter, Thor in the sky bottlenecking the portal. "You and me," he says to Natalia, "we'll stay here on the ground. Keep the fighting here." He casts a look at Darcy, whose face is hidden behind her mask and goggles. "Are you with us?"

She nods, hoisting her rifle up again. "My partner's up there with Hawkeye," she says.

"Thank you," he says. Then he turns back to the giant green man. "And Hulk? Smash."

From there, Darcy lets go and turns control over to that part of herself that is still Snow Maiden, and all she knows is the fight and the kill and the occasional sound of James's voice in her ear until an unfamiliar man's voice breaks into the comm system. "Stark! You hear me? You have a missile headed straight at the city."

A nuclear strike against Manhattan - it's unthinkable. And yet it is happening. Darcy empties clip after clip, tossing aside weapons as they become unusable, struggling to keep the encroaching alien hordes off Cap and Thor, who are now fighting side by side. Stark flies the nuke past them and up the side of his own tower, disappearing into that hole in the sky.

From within the hole, a flash -

The aliens, as one, fall down dead, their connection to whatever hive mind sustained them lost.

Cap's voice says, "Close it."

The sky clears; Stark appears in the aftermath, free-falling. The Hulk catches him, and everyone on the ground converges onto their position.

Snow Maiden thinks, at first, that Stark is dead; then Hulk screams him alive again, and Darcy relaxes.

After that, there is a series of radio check-ins; Natalia reports that she is on top of the tower with Erik Selvig, who is a bit battered and worse for wear but otherwise well enough. Hawkeye reports also that he is fine, having narrowly escaped from some aliens on the rooftop where he was stationed. "But Cap?" he says. "I got some company who asked me to pass on a message to you."

Darcy stiffens.

"Go ahead," Cap says.

Hawkeye says, "He says you're still a punk and apparently he left some of the stupid back here in New York with you."

Darcy sees Cap go preternaturally still, and hears the single word he whispers in disbelief. " _ Bucky? _ "

A moment later, James's voice comes across the line. "Hey, Stevie," he says. "Mind checkin' on my girl there and lettin' me know if she's okay?"

"I am perfectly capable of reporting in for myself, James Barnes," Darcy replies tartly, pulling her glasses off and unfastening her mask. "So don't start."

"Hey, кукла," he says. "Come in with Cap."

"Yes, sir," Darcy replies. She makes eye contact with Steve Rogers, who is staring at her like she's some kind of revelation. She points a finger at him, and flicks it in the direction of Stark's tower. He grins suddenly, and it's boyish and beautiful. He stands up and salutes her, then reaches down to give Stark a hand up off the ground.

She didn't count on Thor. "Darcy!" he exclaims. He rushes to her, grabbing her up in his arms and swinging her around in an enthusiastic hug. She shrieks a little in pure surprise and he puts her down, grinning. "Is my Jane here as well?"

"Should be back at the tower, locked up safe in her lab," Darcy replies. "She'll be hella glad to see you."

"I look forward to it," he says. Then he slings a heavy, comradely arm over her shoulders and starts walking them back toward the tower. "I did not know that you were such a formidable warrior in your own right, young one! I am proud to call you my shield-sister this day."

"Aww," Darcy replies, grinning. "You're gonna make me blush."

"JARVIS," Stark says, "order food." There is a pause. "I don't know. Schwarma or something. Lots of food."

"Does anyone need medical attention?" Darcy asks.

"I might need some stitches," Hawkeye offers. "But nothing serious." Everyone else reports in as uninjured.

She nods. Then she looks up at the green monster walking along with them. "What about that guy?" she asks. "Does he... I mean, will he?"

"Change back?" Stark finishes for her. "When he's ready."

"Hmm. Okay." She looks up at him again and finds him looking back down at her. She says, "Nice work out there today."

He grunts at her. Then he smiles. She smiles back.

They approach the foot of the tower from around Grand Central Station, and Darcy can see James there already, in company with Barton-aka-Hawkeye. Barton was in New Mexico; Darcy feels a slight shiver go down her spine. There's no help for it, though, so they'll just have to deal.

James is still wearing his mask and goggles, but as they round the station, Darcy sees him remove them. Ahead of her, she sees Steve Rogers's steps falter. He stops in his tracks and simply stares for a long moment. She hears him make a low, hurt sound deep in his throat. And then he shouts, " _ Bucky! _ " and he bursts into forward motion.

James takes a few steps forward, but Steve is running, running flat out, and when he reaches James, they collide so hard that Darcy is surprised that there isn't an audible  _ thwack _ . James staggers but holds steady. Steve's arms go around James's neck and James's around Steve's torso, and the two of them stand there holding one another.

As they get closer, Darcy realizes that Steve Rogers is crying. And her heart constricts when she realizes that James Barnes is crying too.

~*~

"Bucky,  _ how? _ " Steve asks. " _ I saw you fall. _ "

"It's a long story," James replies. "Maybe we could... not be on the street while I tell it."

"Yeah. Yeah, of course." Steve has released James, but he's hovering beside him, and Darcy half expects him to take James's hand when the others approach. Fortunately, they're all saved the indignity.

"So, who's the one-armed bandit?" Stark inquires. "Steve, you have friends? How did we not know that you have friends?"

"This is Bucky Barnes," Steve says, slinging an arm around James's shoulders. "He's been my best friend since we were kids."

"Wait," Barton says. "Bucky  _ Barnes? _ But Bucky Barnes died on a mission in the Alps."

"I know," Steve replies, the smile on his face dimming. "I was there."

"So how is this Bucky Barnes?" Barton pushes.

"Again, a long story I'd really rather not tell standing out here in public," James repeats.

Stark heads for the door. "Come on," he says. "We'll head upstairs. Natasha's there already with Selvig and Loki, and we need to deal with him before we can do anything else anyway."

They turn as a group, heading into the building: Stark first, then Rogers with his arm around James's shoulders, and then Barton and the Hulk. Darcy finds herself standing for just a moment totally alone, watching as her husband walks away with his best friend's arm around his shoulders. She swallows hard against the sudden, painful lump in her throat that forms when she realizes that he didn't even look at her through the whole exchange. Then she realizes that she isn't quite alone: Thor is right there, and he's watching her with sharp eyes. She swallows again, clenches her jaw and straightens her shoulders.  _ Emotion is weakness, _ she thinks. And she follows the rest of the group inside without a word.

They even end up having to take a different elevator; the Hulk takes up enough space in the first one for three people, and so Darcy and Thor will not fit inside with everyone else. Thor watches her carefully all the way up, but she does not look at him and he does not speak. They arrive at the penthouse just a few seconds after everyone else, but when the elevator doors open, there is already a standoff going on: Natalia has a handgun in her right hand pointed at James's head, and there is another in her left hand that gets pointed at Darcy's as soon as she steps out of the elevator.

"It's nice to see you, too, Natalia," Darcy says simply.

"So I take it you've all already met," Stark offers, clearly under the mistaken impression that he's funny.

"Whoever you think they are," Natalia says, "they're not. I know them."

Steve raises his hands in a calming gesture. "Why don't we all settle down for a minute," he says. "Natasha, I'm not sure what you think you know, but this is Bucky Barnes, who was my best friend when we were kids."

"No," Natalia replies. "He's the Winter Soldier, the greatest assassin the Soviet Union ever trained."

"Can't I be both?" James offers reasonably.

Natalia - Natasha? - blinks at him, and a small amount of tension bleeds out of her shoulders. "Are you both?" she asks.

"As a matter of fact, I am," James says. "If we could all sit down, I was actually going to explain, since Stevie was wonderin' how I'm still alive after that fall I took."

Natasha relaxes a little bit more, and slowly lowers her weapons, though she doesn't put them away. She says, "First we need to deal with Loki."

Thor nods. "I will take care of him," he says. He reaches into a pouch on his belt and pulls out a small metal item shaped like a flat banana and something else that looks like a miniature pair of handcuffs. He walks over to the place where Loki lies in a trickster-shaped pit on the floor, crouches down, and claps the flat banana onto the front of Loki's face. As the trickster's eyelids begin to flutter, Thor then attaches the handcuffs to his wrists. Then he stands and bends over, grabbing Loki by the back of his collar and hauling him upright. "Is there some place where I may leave him, close by and secure but out of sight? I would not have you all further inconvenienced by his presence."

Stark, after ridding himself of the armor, guides Thor to a guest bathroom and has JARVIS secure the door once Loki is inside. Then the two of them return. By now, the Hulk has turned back into Banner and is draped over a small couch; Steve and James are sitting together on a love seat, Natasha is leaned against a barstool, and Barton is perched on the back of the couch that Banner is sitting on.

Darcy is standing at parade rest by the elevators, resolutely not looking at Steve and James.

Thor frowns and starts to say something, but he's cut off by Stark, who cruises back behind the wet bar. "So! Who wants a drink?"

"I think everyone could use one," Barton suggests.

Natasha shakes her head. "No. I want to hear from the Winter Soldier."

"I have a name," James says mildly. "It's James."

"Oh, is it?" Natasha asked. "And who programmed that into you?"

"Nobody," James replies. "It was in my file."

Natasha blinks. "Your file?"

"Yeah. I got it from Aronov right before Darcy and I got out."

Natasha shakes her head. "Talk sense!"

"How about if I start at the beginning, then?" James offers. "Like, the part where Zola had me in a HYDRA base during the war and before Steve got me outta there, he shot me up with his version of that serum, so when I fell off that train, I lost my arm but I survived."

Steve's breath hitches. "Oh, my God," he whispers, tears standing in his eyes. "Bucky, I didn't know. I swear to God, I didn't know."

"I know you didn't know," James responds, reaching over to clasp Steve's shoulder. "I ain't blamin' you."

"You should," Steve says. "It's my fault. I didn't catch you."

"It wasn't your fault," James contradicts him. "It just happened. That's all." He reaches out and ruffles Steve's hair. "Let it go, punk, okay?"

Steve shakes his head, but he bites his lip and clears his throat and says, "Go on."

James studies him for a minute and then nods. "So, like I say, I lost the arm but I didn't die. The Russians found me, brought me in. And Zola got brought in - don't ask me how, because I have no idea - and he put this arm on me. And then they put me on ice."

"On ice?" Stark asks.

"Cryofreeze," James explains. "Left me there for, I dunno, awhile. Woke me up again in the early fifties, started with the conditioning. They've got tech they use for brain-wiping, they put you in this chair and run electricity straight through your brain, and then they program you with whatever they want you to know. Mostly languages and stuff, or like making it so that if somebody gives you orders you follow 'em without question."

"Mind control," Barton says grimly.

James nods. "Yeah, basically," he agrees. "And since I had the skills for sharpshooting and everything we did in the war, that's what they had me doing."

"And training others," Natasha adds, a tinge of acid in her voice.

James nods again. "And training others," he agrees. "Do you still have that knife I gave you?"

"Lost it in an assassin from Madripoor," she reports.

He clicks his tongue. "Careless."

She laughs, unexpected and low, and Darcy feels her chest burn and heat rise in her cheeks. But James is speaking again. "So I spent the years after that in and out of cryo. Trained some girls for Department X in the Red Room, ran some missions. Actually spent five years in Istanbul working as a bodyguard for a retired Russian general. I'm not sure who that was supposed to embarrass, but it sure as hell didn't matter to me." He shrugs. "Then it was back into the ice until about a year ago, and this time it turned out the Soviet Union had fallen and all of its assets sold off to the highest bidder."

"Who had you?" Banner asks, his voice a low, tired murmur.

"Couple high-ranking HYDRA officers," James replies. "Orders were to kill Stark and retrieve the Iron Man armor."

Stark clearly can't decide if he's horrified or delighted that he's garnered that kind of attention from HYDRA. A great deal of discussion ensues about how large Tony's ego is and whether or not it can be seen from space. Darcy suddenly finds that she couldn't care less about any of it. She doesn't like this. She doesn't like these people and she doesn't want any part of whatever they're doing. James, however, is a different story.

She can see it on James's face. He's missed this. He's missed his friend, he's missed having a team, he's missed being part of something greater than himself. But Darcy never had that. She probably had friends,  _ before, _ but she can't remember them and doesn't care about them. She's never had a team. She's never had anything except James, but he's sitting on that love seat with his eyes glued to Steve Rogers and he hasn't so much as glanced in her direction since Steve Rogers entered the picture.

He even managed to tell Steve Rogers his entire life story without mentioning her once.

She tunes out the conversation. She doesn't care what they're talking about now. She doesn't want to know. She focuses on her breathing and her heartbeat. This is why she was taught that emotion is weakness. She's compromised. For so long, the only thing either of them had was each other, but since he started getting his memory back, he's been haunted by the ghost of Steve Rogers. And now Steve Rogers has walked out of the past and into his life, the word made flesh, and if she thought she was jealous over James having memories and a past and an identity, that was  _ nothing _ compared to this.

She needs to get out of here before she kills one or both of them.

Fortunately, the elevator bell rings. A smoothly English computer voice announces that the food has arrived, and the elevator doors slide open. A delivery man steps out, dragging a cart behind him that is loaded down with all manner and variety of delicious-smelling foods; she waits until everyone's attention is firmly on the arriving meal and then she steps to the side into the still-open elevator and presses the button for the lobby.

As the door slides closed, she accidentally makes eye-contact with Thor. He takes a step in her direction, clearly putting out one hand to stop her from leaving, but it's too late.

Not that she can escape; somewhere around the sixty-fifth floor, the elevator's descent begins to slow. The English computer voice says, "Miss Lewis? I have been asked to request that you return to the penthouse."

"No," she says simply.

There is a moment of silence, and then the voice returns. "I am told to ask why."

She swallows hard. "No," she says again.

A moment after that, James's voice comes through the speakers. "Darcy, come back upstairs."

"No," she says again.

"Why  _ not? _ " he asks, exasperated. "What is going on with you?"

She says, very quietly, "I'm leaving."

"No, you are  _ not, _ " he snarls in Russian. "You are coming back up here  _ right now, _ and that is an  _ order. _ "

"Fuck you," she snarls back, deliberately using English. "I don't have to take your orders any more,  _ Chefchen. _ Did you forget? Pinocchio's a real boy now." By this time, the elevator has slowed to a near-crawl; she reaches for the access panel and says, "Activate computer voice-address system."

"My name is JARVIS," the computer replies.

"JARVIS," she says, with a nod of acceptance, "either reactivate the elevator or I'm going to start rewiring it."

"Sergeant Barnes has requested that - "

"I legitimately do not give a rat's ass  _ what _ Sergeant Barnes requested," Darcy snaps. "Sergeant Barnes couldn't bother to take five seconds to introduce his  _ wife _ to his long-lost bestest friend ever, and I want. To go.  _ HOME. _ "

There is a long silence, and then the elevator begins to descend once more. When it slows to a stop, though, the doors don't open on the lobby as she had expected. Instead, she finds herself on Tony Stark's personal laboratory floor.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there was some confusion yesterday about who recognized whom and whether people knew one another, and that's my bad, because originally yesterday and today were mostly all one chapter, but I added bits and stretched things out and so now they are two chapters and that's kind of why? Ish? Yeah, anyway sorry about that.
> 
> And now for your regularly scheduled... whatever this is.

As befits the dilettante billionaire genius, the place is unevenly divided up into areas based on specialization. There's a small chemistry lab set up, massive banks of holographic design interfaces, and a mechanical workshop that would make any budding engineer pass out with delight. She looks around for a moment out of sheer curiosity before sighing. "JARVIS," she says, "I said I wanted to go home, not to Stark's personal Land of Milk and Honey."

"If you would please be patient for a moment, Miss Lewis," JARVIS replies, "there is someone who wishes to speak to you. After that, if you still wish, you may leave and no one will hinder you."

"I do  _ not _ want to talk to James right now."

"It's not James," says a voice behind her, and she spins around to find that she is not alone any more. Steve Rogers has just stepped out of the other elevator.

She frowns. "What do you want?"

"I wanted to talk to you," he says softly, holding up his hands as if to demonstrate that he is unarmed. He's an idiot if he thinks that will make her relax; she knows all about him and what Erskine, the Great Defector, did to him to turn him into what he is.

"Why?" she demands rudely.

He shrugs. "Well, because apparently aside from being one of the people who helped me stay alive today, you're also my best friend's wife. So I feel like maybe we ought to at least be acquainted."

"I don't want to be acquainted with you," she snaps, knowing she sounds like a petulant child and not really caring.

He seats himself on a stool several feet away from her, clearly not wanting her to feel boxed in, and studies her with those big, sad blue eyes. "I can understand that," he says finally. "Bucky says you've both been with the Russians for a long time, and apparently there was a whole lot of trouble between Russia and the U.S. while I was asleep, so I can understand why you'd be reluctant to know me."

"I don't give a shit about the Russians," she assures him. "Or the U.S., or anything else."

He cocks his head at her. "Then it's me, personally?" he asks. "It's something I've done?"

It's not, not really, but he's here and he's an available target and she's  _ angry _ and she's  _ hurt _ and she's really just spoiling for a fight at this point. "No, no, of  _ course _ not," she replies, scathing in a way that she doesn't think she's ever been before in her life. "Why would I be angry about you swooping in under my nose and stealing the only thing that's ever been mine in my life?" She pauses, her breath catching in her throat, and turns away from him, adding, "He was yours first anyway."

There is a long silence before he speaks again. "I would never try to steal him from you," he says softly. "You have his words, don't you?"

Her hand comes up to rest at her collarbone, instinctively covering that mark on her skin. "Yeah," she admits.

"Darcy," he says, "he's your soul mate. Not only would I never try to steal him away from you, he wouldn't go." He stops, and when she turns to face him again, she sees that he is shaking his head. "The minute you left, he panicked."

She snorts in disbelief. "I find it hard to believe he even noticed," she admits, her voice raw, "considering that he managed to tell you his entire life story without ever mentioning me once."

"I didn't notice," James says from the elevator. "Thor did."

Darcy rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. "This conversation is getting  _ really _ fucking crowded."

"Especially since you didn't want to have it in the first place, right?" Steve asks. He gives her a slight, apologetic smile. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to seem like I was trying to take him away from you. It's only... from my perspective, it's only been about three weeks since I watched him fall off that train in the Alps. I thought he was dead. And then I put a plane in the ocean trying to stop HYDRA and get revenge on them for killing him. I thought I was gonna die, only I didn't, and then I was suddenly here. And then I was suddenly fighting aliens, and then I was suddenly looking at him again and I just... I forgot. I forgot everything and everyone except for him. And I'm sorry that I hurt you by doing that."

James steps forward, reaching for her, and when she doesn't stick a knife between his ribs, he puts his arm around her and pulls her to him. "I'm sorry, too, кукла," he says softly. "I got distracted by him and I forgot about you standin' right there. And that's on me. I didn't mean to make you feel left out." He runs his metal hand over her braid. "Think how you'd feel if you saw your Ma or your Pa again, and you'll know how I felt when I saw him."

She stiffens, and then she turns and shoves him away from her. "Fuck you, James Barnes," she snarls. "How  _ dare _ you."

He blinks - and she sees it, the moment it registers with him. "Oh, shit, кукла," he says, reaching for her. "I didn't mean - "

"Don't you fucking  _ touch _ me!" She slaps his hand away. "Don't you  _ dare. _ "

"Darcy - "

And suddenly Steve is standing between them, his hands out to keep them apart. "Stop," he says, his voice low but commanding. "Stop it." And then he turns to her and he reaches out, taking her in his arms, and she realizes dimly that she is crying and she's not sure why.

He's holding her close, rubbing her back and murmuring softly into her ear. And then he says, with a faint hint of a laugh, "Jeez, Buck, I thought  _ I _ was supposed to be the one who was no good with the ladies."

James snorts softly. "Looks like that might be one thing I left behind in that mountain pass after all." He approaches from the side, and his hand tentatively joins Steve's on her back. "Кукла," he whispers. "Come here."

Steve releases her, and she turns to James, falling into his arms. He hooks a stool with his foot and sits down on it, pulling her into his lap and holding her tight in the circle of his arms. "I'm sorry," he says. "I shouldn't ought to have said that. I know how much it bothers you that you can't remember them. I didn't mean to hurt you."

She nods, her hands clutching at the straps of his leather armor, and she cries into his shoulder for the first time since Berlin. It feels so good to sit here and let him hold her, to remember why she fell in love with him: the gentle heart that hid inside the body of the merciless killer; the soft soul inside the hard shell that matched and cushioned her own even in the dark times when she thought they might have burned it out along with the rest of her humanity. She presses her forehead into the crook of his neck and he holds her close, and she feels Steve's warm hand come to rest on the back of her head like a benediction.

A little while later, once she's calm again, they go back upstairs. There is still plenty of food, which is good, because all three of them have accelerated metabolisms, all three of them are starving, and all three of them are emotionally wrung out and fully capable of stuffing their feelings with food, at least for a little while. The mood in the room is more somber than it was before - apparently a toast has been drunk to the memory of a SHIELD agent who died in the battle, but Darcy can't honestly bring herself to care. People die all the time; that's how it works.

Once they're eating, though, Stark begins asking questions.

"So, Tin Man," he says to James. "What's with the arm?" Darcy rolls her eyes; Tony's seen the arm a hundred or more times, and _now_ he's acting like it's brand new?

"Prosthetic," James replies around a mouthful of really good schwarma wrapped in pita. "A triumph of Soviet ingenuity."

Natasha and Darcy both snort in amusement. Darcy adds, "I'm so glad my eye was made by the Germans; it's almost sure to outlast Brezhnev!"

Natasha and James both howl; Stark is less interested in Soviet humor and more interested in what she's said around it. "Your eye?" he asks.

Darcy nods, and refrains from flinching or killing him when he gets up close and personal. "Which one?"

Sighing, she reaches up and pops her prosthetic out, offering it to him on her open palm. "That one."

Stark stares at it. Banner leans forward in his seat and stares at it as well. "Uh," Banner says after a moment, "is that... I mean... pardon me for asking, but is that a USB plug?"

Darcy nods again, returning her eye to its socket. It takes a moment for it to reactivate, and then she blinks up at them. "Ugh," she says. "I hate going monocular. Anyway, yes, it's a USB connection. It's the most recent upgrade; before that, it was a two-pin TS connector. The original was a one-pin, though. Like a stereo headphone jack."

"How..." Stark manages, though he appears to be having some trouble breathing. "How does that attach inside your head?"

"I have an implant," Darcy explains.

"What  _ kind _ of implant?" Banner asks. His eyes are bright and interested.

Darcy considers how best to answer this question. She isn't sure she wants them knowing what she is and isn't capable of. Finally she says, "A German one."

Natasha snorts again. Steve steps in. "Let's leave the third degree for another time, gentlemen," he says.

Stark points a finger at her. "You've been holding out on me, Cyclops," he says. "If I'd known you had that kind of tech in your head, we'd have been besties a long time ago."

"And that would be why you didn't know I had that kind of tech in my head, asshole," she replies calmly, spearing a falafel ball on her fork and taking a bite of it.

"In my own house!" Stark exclaims, spreading a hand across his chest in mock affront. "In my own living room!"

"To be fair, you  _ did _ sort of set yourself up for that," Banner points out.

Stark shrugs. "It's a thing." He sits back on the couch, looking around the room. "I have to say," he begins.

"No, you really don't," Barton interrupts.

"Look here, Robin Hood," Stark says, pointing a finger at him.

"What am I lookin' at?" Barton asks, a shit-eating grin on his face.

"Your new teammate, if you're so inclined," a new voice says, entering the conversation without so much as a by-your-leave. Everyone turns to see a tall, well-built black man with an eyepatch standing in the doorway. As he strides forward, his trench coat flaps like a cape behind his legs. He comes to a stop in front of the coffee table, looking around at all of them with his single eye. "Ladies and gentlemen," he says, "I'd like to welcome all of you to the Avengers Initiative."

"Who the fuck are you?" James demands.

"Nick Fury," the man replies. "Director of SHIELD. And you're James Buchanan Barnes, formerly of the Howling Commandos, and apparently also known as the Winter Soldier, half of the most feared Soviet assassin team that ever existed." He turns his single eyed gaze upon Darcy. "That makes you the Snow Maiden, but I gotta admit, as hard as I've tried, I haven't been able to find a damn thing on you, including your real name. All I get is your cover."

Darcy smirks. "Good," she says. "I like it that way." Her implant is working overtime, digging deep into the files she already has and into whatever she can access through the nearest unsecured wireless Internet connection. "Fury, Nicholas Joseph," she says. "Former U.S. Army Colonel, currently director of SHIELD. Hand-picked by Alexander Pierce himself." She smirks. "How's it feel to work both sides of the fence?"

Fury glares at her. "The hell are you talking about?"

She sits back on the couch, picking up a small container of shish tawook and a fork. "Nothin'," she says, aping James's Brooklyn drawl. "Don't mind me."

Fury's eye circles the room. "As I was saying," he continues, "SHIELD is interested in forming a new team - a team of people like you, who have special abilities and can protect us against special threats. That's what the Avengers Initiative is all about. And I'm here to ask all of you to join it."

"No, thanks," Darcy says around a mouthful of chicken.

"Do you have something you'd like to share with the rest of the class?" Fury snaps.

Darcy smirks. "I don't know. Do you think it's relevant that Alexander Pierce is the ranking HYDRA agent on this continent?"

The room goes totally silent.

Darcy sets aside the shish tawook and picks up a fatayer stuffed with savory meat and onions. "Man, I miss Istanbul," she says to no one in particular, taking a massive bite of the thick meat pie.

Fury is the first to recover his voice. "That's a strong accusation you're making," he says. "Can you prove it?"

"If I couldn't, I wouldn't have brought it up," Darcy replies.

Fury's eye switches back and forth between Darcy and James. "What do you want in exchange?"

"We want to be left alone," James says flatly. "They took everything from us. All we want is a chance to live our lives."

"You're the Winter Soldier and she's the Snow Maiden," Fury replies. "I'm pretty sure there's not going to be any  _ left alone _ for you." He stops speaking for a moment, then shakes his head, his shoulders relaxing a little bit and his expression shifting slightly to one of sympathy. "And I'm sorry about that. If even half of the rumors I've heard about the two of you are true... I'm sorry. I wish I could give you your lives back, ship you off to Bumfuck, Iowa to live out the rest of your lives in peace, maybe raise up some corn and a passel of kids. But you know as well as I do that it's not going to happen. That chance, for you two, is gone."

Neither James nor Darcy speaks. In her periphery, she sees Steve and Tony exchange glances. She takes a deep breath and waits, because Fury is obviously not done.

"What I can offer you is protection," he finally says. "I can give you a team that will have your back, that will watch out for you and be there when you need it."

"How can you do that when SHIELD is infested with HYDRA?" James asks, his voice soft. "How can you promise what you don't have?"

On the other side of him, Natasha and Barton both snap to attention. "What do you mean, infested with HYDRA?" Barton demands.

"Not now, Barton," Fury begins, but Barton is having none of this.

"No, I think  _ right now, _ " he says. "I think right now, before Phil Coulson's body is even cold. I want to know what the  _ hell _ is going on here."

"I can show you," Darcy says. "All I need is a secure wired connection. There's too much data for me to transmit it all wirelessly."

As a group, they all troop back down to Stark's lab. He presents his workstation to her with a flourish. She says, "I need a connector."

He points to the USB reader slot. "Right there."

"No," she says. "I mean a connector. Double-ended male, at least a couple of feet long."

"A  _ cord? _ " he asks, even as he digs one out of a drawer. "What are you plugging in?"

She attaches one end to the computer, then reaches up and pops out her prosthetic, placing it on the desktop. "Me," she replies simply.

She turns her head, because she's seen the kinds of reactions that non-upgraded humans have to this kind of thing before. With the ease of long practice, she plugs the cord into her implant, then closes her other eye and focuses on the data stream.

_::Good afternoon.::_

She starts. _ ::Hello?:: _

_::I am JARVIS.::_

_ ::Artificial sapience?::  _ The idea is fascinating, but she'd rather not have a new presence infecting her implant.

_::Indeed. Please do not be alarmed; I have no intention of uploading any part of myself into your own systems. I merely wished to be of assistance if possible.::_

_::Can you project these files for the others to see?::_

_ ::Of course, Miss Lewis.::  _ There is a pause, and then,  _ ::They are projected.:: _

She opens her eye. Everyone is staring at a high-resolution image of a young Alexander Pierce standing in front of a huge HYDRA symbol, saluting with one fist in the air. "Is that proof enough for you, Fury?" she asks. "Or do you need me to start pulling out the names of the double agents in your ranks? I've got a few right here, but it might take some time to find the rest."

"Coulson," Barton chokes out. "Is Coulson on your list?"

Darcy closes her eye again and begins sifting through files. "Coulson," she says. "Philip J. No, he looks clean as far as I can tell."

She hears a collective sigh of relief from the gathered crowd and opens her eye again, this time turning and pinning Fury with it. "Well?" she says.

Fury turns from the image of Pierce to look at her. To his credit, he doesn't visibly react to the sight of the cord running into her eye socket. "We could use your help," he says simply. "How would you like to fight on the side of the angels for awhile?" 

"There are no angels in this fight," she replies. "Only devils dressed in white. And frankly, Director, I don't care about your causes or your sides."

"What  _ do _ you care about?" Thor asks softly. 

"I care about James," Darcy replies, turning to face him. "I care about Jane, because she's proven herself, and I care about you because she cares about you. I care about Steve because James cares about Steve. But to be perfectly honest with you, Thor, aside from that? Everybody else on this mudball can go fuck themselves."

"That's kind of a limiting life perspective," Tony says.

"Fuck you, Stark," Darcy responds, but there is no heat to her words. "Talk to James if you want somebody with human emotions. I don't have them. They got burned out of me when I was thirteen or so, along with every memory I ever had of my parents, my childhood, or anything about my life before I became what I am today. So if you're looking for the person inside the machine, James is your best bet. I don't have one any more."

James moves, resting both his hands on her shoulders and leaning over her to whisper in her ear. "Кукла, you know that's not true."

She shrugs, closing her eye and turning back toward the computer terminal.  _ ::I am disconnecting now. Thank you for your assistance.:: _

_ ::You are most welcome,:: _ JARVIS replies.  _ ::Please feel free to contact me again if you have need of me.:: _ She feels it - him? - offer her a secured, passive wireless connection. After a moment of deliberation, she accepts it, and it settles into the back of her mind, available but inactive. She disconnects the physical cord, wiping it clean on the leg of her pants before setting it down on the workspace, and then she re-inserts her prosthetic, waiting for it to reconnect and her vision to clear before turning back to face the others.

The picture of Pierce is still up on the projector. Fury is looking around at all of them. "It appears that there is a new mission for the Avengers, if you want to take it," he says. "It's been under our noses all this time, and we had no idea." He glances over his shoulder. "This explains a lot of things to me, like why the World Security Council scrapped the original plans for the Avengers Initiative." Then he looks back at all of them, making eye contact with each one - including Darcy. "Your world needs you," he says softly. "You've all defended it once today already; will you do it again?"

"Against HYDRA?" Steve says, his voice low and vibrant. "I will always fight against HYDRA." Tony Stark nods his agreement; so do Barton and Banner and Natasha.

Thor nods as well, much more regal in his way. "I am sworn to defend the Earth against all its enemies," he says. "And seeing what they have done to these two most honorable individuals who stand before us now, I freely declare that HYDRA is the enemy of the Earth and I will fight it until its end."

The group then turns, looking expectantly at James and Darcy. He looks down at her. "What do you think, кукла?" he asks softly. "Are you willing, or are you tired of fighting?"

She shrugs. "I've never known anything  _ but _ the fight, Chefchen. You know that. What I said is the truth: I don't care about sides or nations or SHIELD or HYDRA. But if you're going to fight, you're not going without me at your back."

James nods, then looks up at the others. He says, "We're with you."

"Good," Fury says. "Let's get started."

~*~

After extracting promises that they will at least consider moving into the main tower building when (not  _ if _ ) he builds them an apartment, Tony graciously allows Darcy and James to leave the penthouse and head back to their own small apartment elsewhere in the complex, and Steve (after making a similar promise to Tony) goes with them. He is reluctant to be parted from James so soon after finding him again, and Darcy supposes she can understand that. His bond with James isn't like hers, but she knows what it's like for James to be the only stable thing in a world that makes no sense, and after the sensitivity Steve showed to her earlier when he didn't even know who she was, she is willing to cut him some slack.

After all, she keeps reminding herself, just because James loves Steve as a brother, it doesn't change the bond he has with her. And Steve seems a decent sort; she could see herself eventually coming to appreciate him for himself, once she's a little less off-kilter about everything.

She leaves them in the living room, drinking Brooklyn-brewed craft beer and talking quietly about people they used to know; she goes into the master bedroom and pushes the door closed behind herself. In the back of the closet, the carpet has been pulled up and then tacked back down; she pulls it up again and retrieves the manila folder with her name on the front. Then she sits down beside the bed, leaning back against it, and she takes a deep breath, calming herself. She opens the folder.

The first thing she encounters is a photograph of herself that she doesn't remember having taken; in it, she is small and barefoot and wild-eyed, wearing a knee-length, green flannel nightgown. The file lists all of the dry particulars of her existence up until that point: full name, parents' names, place and date of birth (Racine, Wisconsin; March 12, 1951), place of residence (Racine, Wisconsin), date of acquisition (September 25, 1964).

There is a brief report on how she came to the attention of the HYDRA cell that acquired her and the acquisition operation, and she winces a little bit as she reads about how the agents murdered her parents. She knows it's standard protocol - witnesses are a liability, especially witnesses who will stop at nothing to retrieve the acquired asset - but she also understands, from a psychological standpoint, the significant trauma inflicted by witnessing the murders in question. No wonder her young self looks so shell-shocked.

She keeps reading; next comes a preparation report. A young, terrified, traumatized child wouldn't have required much preparation, but they had the time while the second cryostasis tube was being built. The report details sensory deprivation and extended isolation, followed by physical abuse. At the end of the report, the subject is described as "compliant."

The documentation switches from English to Russian in 1966 when the two assets are acquired by Department X; after a brief stay in Moscow, the stasis tubes are transferred to Leningrad. There is a note that the Alpha unit was activated once in that year, and that when he came out of stasis, he inquired about her. As a reward for a job well done, he was allowed to see her in her tube before being returned to his. Then in 1967, the Beta unit was activated for training at the Red Room facility. The reports here detail her progress in training as well as her physical development. She finds a memo dated 1968, written by a Doctor Orlov, noting that the asset designated Beta had physically developed far more than was considered optimum for a Black Widow training candidate, and that surgical alteration was recommended to reduce the physical proportions to acceptable dimensions; the surgery was approved by someone with an illegible signature.

There is a brief discipline report from mid-1970 detailing a rules breach at the Red Room facility: the asset designated Beta was discovered out of the dormitory in the night, sleeping against the cryostasis tube containing the asset designated Alpha. Corrective discipline was administered, but after discussion, it was deemed necessary to deactivate the Beta unit against the case that the programming might slip.

She vaguely remembers the reactivation after that, when Winter Soldier had been concerned about her back looking like raw hamburger, but then they had administered the serum to her - as detailed in the next set of memos, which came from the Dresden facility in 1973. She has a lot of memories from Dresden, and it's somewhat amusing to read the official reports of the training exercises, especially the first one, when he taught her how to evade capture and they toured most of East Germany. The part where they evaded capture in Berlin and the pursuing officer became convinced that they had somehow crossed the wall into West Germany is particularly entertaining.

She passes over the official reports of her first mission and the subsequent death of Doctor Orlov; Lukin's gloating tone over that incident is clear, and she can easily visualize the smirk that must have been on his face when he was writing that report. She shakes her head, thinking about the fact that her automatic act of self-defense garnered her nearly a full year of an almost-normal life - or at least, as normal as it could get in that facility.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we've reached the end, folks! Hope you've enjoyed this ride! Thank you all for the comments and kudos! <3 <3 <3

James sticks his head into the room to ask what she wants for dinner and interrupts her as she's reading about their transfer to Istanbul. The politics behind the transfer (and Karpov's selfish anger about something that happened decades previously) are almost enough to taint the happy memories she has of her life there. James comes to crouch beside her, glancing down at the page she's reading. "Ah," he says softly. "Yeah, Karpov..." He shakes his head. "Well. It doesn't matter now."

"No," she agrees. "It doesn't. Look at this, though." She points out a section on the next page, the report of her return from a solo mission in Qatar, which is dated December 12, 1983. "That's when we married."

He smiles, reaching over to cover her left hand with his. That battered wedding ring that he bought secondhand in Istanbul is somehow still on her finger. Karpov didn't especially care that his assets had married; in fact, his written report expresses a hurtful sort of amusement.

_ My two little Pinocchios are pretending to be real, _ he wrote. _ He left yesterday to meet her train in Ankara, and when they returned today, she was wearing a gold ring. I have no idea where they found a priest willing to marry two people with no names, especially in this country, but apparently they did. It's quite entertaining to watch her; she rubs at the ring with her thumb like a real newlywed, like she can't quite believe it's happening to her. If I didn't know better, I'd think she was actually in love with him - and he with her, come to that! And watching them interact with the little Turkish boy assigned to fetch and carry for them, you'd almost think them a real family. Of course that is impossible; the technicians assure me that the wipes completely remove all trace of human emotion. _

_It matters not. I know that there are only a few years left for me, and I wish to spend them watching these twisted creatures defend my life. I almost feel sorry for them, as they tense up whenever anyone approaches, ready to dive in front of a bullet for me. It will never make up for what the Americans did to me in the war, how they shamed me in front of my own men, but even after all these years, it still makes me smile to see Captain America's partner serving Mother Russia, and even more so to see him do it in the company of his lovely little soul mate. Let us see what kind of damage they can do to their country's efforts in the Middle East. These next few years should be amusing. I am glad that Yuri transferred me. To hell with him._

Darcy rubs at her wedding ring with her thumb - a habit now, after so many years, that she doesn't really care about breaking. She can only assume that the HYDRA agents who activated them in D.C. didn't notice the ring, because it seems the kind of thing they would have been opposed to. She's grateful for that; its loss wouldn't have been devastating, but it would definitely have hurt. Because whatever the technicians may have promised Karpov, human emotion was maybe the only thing they  _ didn't _ take away.

"I love you, you know," he murmurs, leaning down to press a gentle kiss to her temple. "No matter what. Whether you get your memories back or don't, regardless of anything HYDRA or the Red Room did to either of us." He turns his arm over, exposing the girlish handwriting there.

She runs a finger across the marked skin. "I was so young when they took me," she says. She flips back to the original picture of herself at thirteen. "They just scooped out everything and turned me into a monster."

"No," he says firmly. "Not a monster." He tugs her chin up to make her look at him. "We did what we were programmed to do, and what we had to do to survive. That doesn't make us monsters."

She's not convinced, but she lets it go for now. Instead, she turns back to the reports. "I wonder what happened to little Mehmet," she says.

"I don't know," he replies. "Maybe we can go to Istanbul and try to find him."

"Maybe." She sighs, closing the folder and setting it aside.

He stands up. "Come out and talk with us?"

"In a bit." She gives him a slight, tired smile. "I need to think about this."

He nods. "We were thinking of ordering Chinese."

"That's fine. Let me know when it gets here."

He goes back out, and she leans her head against the side of the bed. She closes her eyes, second-guesses herself a few times, and then does something she's never done before. She connects to the Internet and actively searches for herself.

The first results are from newspaper archives: the reports of her parents' murders and her kidnap made national news. Headlines from coast to coast scream about the double murder outside Chicago and the disappearance of the couple's young teenage daughter. All manner of wild speculation fills the articles of the time, anything from a targeted killing by a child-slavery ring to the idea that she might have killed her own parents and fled. Her most recent school photograph accompanies every article, depicting a pretty young pre-teen girl with long dark hair and huge, soulful eyes.

She doesn't remember ever being that innocent.

Her extended family searched for her for a long time before finally giving up; there are retrospectives and updates in the Racine newspaper every so often, clearly managed by her grandfather, who is often interviewed for the pieces. In a few of the later ones, her teenage photo is run alongside an artist's rendering of what she might look like now, five years or ten years after her disappearance. Anyone with information is encouraged to call.

She sighs softly at the age-progressed image showing what she might look like at twenty-three; it was published in 1975. Technically, she is sixty-one years old, but by her own count, she has less than twenty-five years of lived experience. She wonders how many years James has.

One of her cousins is now the chairperson of a national foundation dedicated to missing and exploited children; it bears Darcy's name. She  _ really _ isn't sure how she feels about that. 

She drops the Internet connection and opens her eyes at a tap on the door frame; it is Steve, looking at her hopefully with those big blue eyes. "The food's here," he says. "Will you come eat with us?"

She nods, pushes up out of the floor, and stretches. "Yeah, I'm getting stiff down there anyway."

He smiles. "You know, Darcy," he says, his voice gentle, "Bucky's been my best friend since we were schoolboys in short pants."

"I know," she says. "He told me, when he was getting his memories back. And sometimes he talks about you." She pauses, then offers, "He missed you a lot, when he thought you were dead."

"I missed him a lot, too," Steve says. "But... what I'm trying to say is... you're his girl. His wife, I mean. For, what, five years now?"

"About six and a half, if we're talking lived time," she corrects him. "Twenty-nine if we're being chronological."

"I don't count frozen time," he assures her. "I am  _ not _ ninety-four, I don't care  _ what _ Tony Stark says when he thinks he's being funny." She has to laugh at that, and he grins at her, big and bright. "What I'm trying to say, though, is that... I want us to be friends. Because he loves you, a lot, and I love him, and I want him to be happy, and you make him happy."

She cocks her head at him. "So do you," she assures him. "But I get what you're saying. And yeah, Steve, we're okay." She offers her hand, and he shakes it firmly. Then she says, "Come on, I can smell the kung pao chicken, and I'm starving."

"Me, too," he says, following her back toward the living room. "I don't know about the serum they gave you two, but the one they gave me makes me just want to eat and eat and eat  _ all the time. _ "

"Metabolism times four, according to the files Aronov gave me," Darcy agrees. She leads Steve into the kitchen, where James is putting the food containers out on the tiny table. "So, yeah. We go through a  _ lot _ of peanut butter and milk and things."

"You know," Steve offers, seating himself and reaching for a container of broccoli and beef, "I used to be allergic to peanuts."

"Punk, you were allergic to  _ everything, _ " James says, dropping into his own chair and claiming a box of noodles. "I'm pretty sure you were allergic to air and sunshine."

Darcy laughs softly, listening to them bicker, and helps herself to the kung pao chicken. Watching them grin at one another across the table, seeing how happy his friend's presence makes James, she makes a decision in the back of her mind to let his happiness infect her. She doesn't know how to be a person, not really, but he does. And as with all things, if she lets him, he can teach her. So she closes off the part of her that wants to dwell on the contents of that folder, and she watches the two boys play, and she reminds herself that she's not a robot any more. She's a person now.

~*~

Explaining everything to Jane, who only got bits and pieces from Thor and was deeply confused because of it, results in exactly the kind of hysterics that Darcy expected; she sits back in her chair in the lab and lets Jane freak out for as long as she needs to before saying, "Are you done?"

Jane shuts up quite suddenly, considers Darcy, and says, "Maybe. I'm not sure yet." She folds her arms and suddenly glares at Darcy. "You did lie to me for a very long time about some pretty important stuff."

Darcy shrugs. "Fair enough."

Jane has, predictably, a million questions about Darcy's early life and training. Darcy answers them all in as much detail as she thinks she can give without Jane getting that  _ poor sweet lamb _ face, and eventually Jane gets tired of hearing about death and destruction (and one of the machines lets out an alarm) and so the subject gets changed. Thor, with the instincts of a born diplomat, never brings up the subject again.

Tony Stark is harder to deal with, because he's desperate to get his hands on the tech in Darcy's head. He starts coming by Jane's lab, and she finally throws him out, appealing to JARVIS to enforce his exile. Once that happens, he starts coming by the small apartment that was assigned to James and Darcy when they first came to New York. He doesn't count on the fact that Steve, once reunited with his best friend, only went back to his lonely Brooklyn flat once to pick up his things, and is now living in their second bedroom. Tony's capable of being an asshole in front of Steve's disapproving stare and in front of James's best murderous glare, but the two combined - along with the hunting knife Darcy finally pulls out of her waistband when she threatens to cut off his balls - finally force him to back off.

It takes about three weeks after the Chitauri attack for Tony to formally invite them to move into their own floor of the main Tower, which has been rechristened Avengers Tower, in honor of the new team of superheroes that now lives there. Tony is extremely proud of himself for having managed to collect and cultivate this new team - never mind that he actually did none of the collecting or the cultivating.

Moving is a strange experience, because this time, they do almost none of the actual work. Tony sends a crew of movers to bring all of their things, and Darcy supervises them closely while Steve and James bring all the weaponry. There's no way in hell James is letting anyone mess around with his guns, and Steve doesn't let anyone but Avengers (and the occasional small child) touch his shield.

The new apartment is a four-bedroom monstrosity that takes up an entire floor of the Tower. Fortunately, it's one of the floors at the top, where the architecture is actually narrow and backswept, so at least it's a  _ small _ floor. It's still far more apartment than they need, so they turn one of the extra bedrooms into an art studio for Steve, who is still living with them even though Tony protests that he built the next floor down just for him. (It's a mess of vintage and reproduction thirties-era furniture, decorated with wartime propaganda posters and an unholy amount of red, white, and blue. Steve takes one look at the place and refuses to have anything to do with it.) The other spare bedroom stands empty, its door resolutely shut, and Darcy thinks again of those Google searches, and she wonders when or if James will ever broach the subject with her.

Despite the unexpected roommate and the elephant in the room, it's still the nicest place Darcy has ever lived. The public area floors and fixtures gleam with sustainably harvested bamboo; the kitchen and bathrooms are tiled in terrazzo made of recycled glass; the bedrooms are floored with thick, soft carpets. The furniture is modern and attractive, the color scheme mostly neutral with hints of rich greens and purples, and the bed in the master bedroom is easily big enough for four people who don't even like each other very well to sleep comfortably. (The headboard is also reinforced with steel, and suddenly there are a lot of exciting new web searches going on in the privacy of Darcy's head.)

Still, none of this is important. The important thing is, as always, that they are together - Darcy and James (and now Steve, who has easily been folded into their lives, though not their bed, because Steve is apparently exclusively gay, which was not a thing that Darcy had expected). Living in the lap of luxury, or living in a shitty back-street motel in East Berlin, Darcy has never cared, as long as she had James with her.

Still, that massive bathtub with the jacuzzi jets? Fucking awesome.

So, dealing with Tony Stark mostly consists of taking his gifts when he offers them (because Tony reads rejection of his gifts as rejection of himself and responds poorly) and reminding him that her eyeball is off limits. It's really not that difficult, and she only has to threaten him once, maybe twice a month.

Dealing with Natasha is different, and it takes Darcy some time to decide on the best route to take. Eventually, she decides on straightforward combat.

She goes to Clint Barton first, because Barton is the one person whom Natasha trusts unconditionally. Darcy finds him one afternoon in the kitchen on the communal floor and she stands in the doorway when she speaks, her hands tucked into the back pockets of her jeans. "I'd like to ask you for a favor."

Barton, who was shoulders-deep in the refrigerator, pulls back and turns to face her, his expression carefully blank. "You're welcome to ask," he says, "but I won't promise anything."

"Of course not," she agrees. She takes a deep breath. "I don't know what Natalia – sorry,  _ Natasha _ – has told you about our joint history, but there are many reasons for her to distrust me, and there are not many reasons why she should see me as an ally. I understand this, and her concerns about me are valid. But if this...  _ Initiative _ is going to be successful, then we need to be able to work together and trust one another in the field. Right now, we don't have that, she and I."

He nods. "That... feels like an accurate assessment."

"So," she continues, "I'd like to train with her. Just once to start, but probably more afterward, if everything goes the way I hope it will."

He studies her. "What do you need me for?"

"I need you to stand there with your bow and shoot me if I need to be shot."

Barton blinks slowly, staring at her in blank-faced shock for a long moment. Then, slowly, his mushed-up face creases in a grin. "I like the way you think," he says.

She smiles back. "So you'll help me?"

"Yeah," he says. "I'll help you."

That afternoon, he settles himself into a nest near the ceiling of the gym, and Natasha comes down in response to his invitation to spar. She strolls into the gym dressed in workout clothes, and stops in her tracks when she sees Darcy standing beside the fighting ring. "What are  _ you _ doing here?"

"I'm here to spar, if you want to," Darcy replies.

"So you can put a knife between my ribs?" Natasha asks, looking skeptical.

Darcy grins, showing all her teeth. "I don't know, Natalia," she says in Russian. "There was a time when you never would have let me get that close. I wonder if my skills have improved so much." She pulls out a knife, flipping it in her hand, still grinning. "Are you afraid to find out?"

Natasha's eyes narrow. "I'm not afraid of you," she replies, also in Russian.

Darcy laughs. "Prove it."

In one smooth move, Natasha is up and over the ropes and in the ring; Darcy follows her, rolling gracefully between the ropes and then standing up to face her opponent. Ostentatiously, she tosses the knife she's been holding out of the ring, letting it land on the hard gym floor with a clatter.

From above, a soft whistle sounds. Darcy does not move, but Natasha's eyes track upward. When they return to Darcy, there is a new respect there. "Trying to lull me into a false sense of security?" she offers, and now there is a note of humor in her voice.

Darcy shrugs. "At least you know that if I kill you, you'll be avenged."

Natasha grins then, full on. "That was never in doubt," she replies. "This just tells me how quickly it'll be."

Darcy rolls her shoulders. "So are we fighting, or are we talking about boys and braiding each other's hair?"

"We never talked about boys and braided each other's hair when we were children," Natasha replies, disarming herself. "Why would we start now?"

Darcy shrugs again, grinning. "I heard you'd gone soft since switching sides."

"We'll see about that."

The dance begins.

Natasha's style has changed greatly in the years since they had trained together; she is far more precise, almost balletic, and Darcy wonders if she's gotten dance training. Darcy herself, of course, has been trained one-on-one by the Winter Soldier, so her style is far more brute force – or, as Steve calls it, smash-and-dash. While Natasha spins and twirls, Darcy jabs and lunges. Natasha jumps and somersaults; Darcy dodges and rolls. They exchange blows, a hook here and a jab there; Darcy claims first blood when she catches Natasha in the lip with her elbow, but Natasha immediately gets payback with a heel to Darcy's nose.

James and Steve wander in, planning to use the punching bags, but stop and seat themselves on the bleachers to watch the two women. James winces when Natasha grabs Darcy's long braid and snatches her to the floor of the ring; both men cringe when Darcy applies a return kick to Natasha's crotch from her supine position before bouncing back to her feet. Clint climbs down from his nest and goes to sit beside Steve, and if Darcy were able to pay any kind of attention to the three men, she would positively  _ gloat  _ at the way Steve blushes and stammers at Clint's shy smile.

And then a sudden confluence of jab-dodge-twist-leap-spin kick-shove ends with Darcy on her face, both of Natasha's hands wrapped around her head in exactly the right position to snap her spine with a quick twist. The controlled power in those hands makes the fingers tremble against Darcy's face, and everyone in the room goes almost preternaturally still for half a second before Darcy's flat hand bangs twice on the mat, indicating her surrender.

Natasha releases her immediately, and Darcy rolls over onto her back. Natasha extends a hand to her, and Darcy takes it, letting Natasha pull her to her feet. She grins once she's upright again. "That was  _ way _ better than it used to be," she says cheerfully. 

"You're a lot harder to take down than you were when we were small," Natasha agrees.

Darcy laughs. "Hear that, Chefchen? It was all worth it!"

James snorts in reply. "Then why are you bleeding on the mat?"

"Because it's fun!"

~*~

James is the one who realizes a very important thing that somehow got missed in all the chaos. It's about three months after the alien invasion and they're standing in the gym after a sparring session when James turns to say something to Steve just as Steve strips off his shirt, and James stops, staring. "Stevie," he says. "You never had words before. When did you get words?"

"What are you talkin' about?" Steve asks.

James reaches out and lays his palm on Steve's left shoulder blade. "Right here," he says. "It says  _ I can. _ "

Steve blinks, crossing the gym floor to stand in front of the mirror and twist, looking at the scrawl on his skin. "Huh," he says. "I didn't know that was there."

James calls across the gym to Darcy and Natasha, who have just finished their own bout. "C'mere and look at this," he shouts.

They come, and they look, and Natasha says, "Oh, my God."

"What?" the others all say.

"I know that handwriting," she says. "Wait here." And she sprints from the room.

James, Darcy, and Steve all look at one another in confusion, shrug, and begin cleaning up towels and equipment. About ten minutes later, Natasha is back - and she's dragging Clint along with her. "Take your shirt off," she demands.

Clint looks at her like he thinks she's finally lost it, but he knows better than to argue, so he pulls his shirt off over his head. Flowing across his lower back are the words  _ Got a suit? _ in a neat copperplate hand.

"Oh, my God," Darcy exclaims, clapping her hands to her mouth. "Oh, my God. Steve and  _ Clint! _ That's  _ adorable! _ "

Clint and Steve stare at one another in shock for a long minute before Steve finally swallows hard and says, "Well... hi."

Clint laughs. "Hi," he says in return.

James rolls his eyes. "For fuck's sake," he says, giving Steve a gentle shove. "Go make out or something."

Clint chokes; Steve blushes bright red down to the middle of his chest and pulls his shirt back on quickly. "Um," he says. "Do you... wanna go get a hot dog or something?"

"Sure," Clint says quickly, to the accompaniment of chortles from the audience. "Anything to get away from this bunch of jokers for awhile."

"You should be thanking us," Natasha admonishes, grinning broadly.

"Maybe someday," Clint replies tartly. Then he reaches out and grabs Steve's hand, and they disappear down the hallway.

Natasha, still grinning, goes off to get her own shower. James slings an arm around Darcy's shoulders, leaning down to kiss her despite the sweat of her workout. "That's perfect, кукла," he says softly. "Everything's workin' out just like it ought to."

Darcy smiles, tiptoeing to kiss him back warmly. "It's good, Chefchen," she agrees. "It's very good."


End file.
